


Pet

by willowoftheriver



Series: only when i hit the ground [2]
Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Abusive Relationship, Achieving godhood, Angst, Betrayal, Blond Chris, Brainwashing, Devotion, Drugging, Excella bashing, Existential Crisis, Grief/Mourning, Insanity, Kidnapping, Love/Hate, M/M, Memory Loss, Obsessive Love, Partnership, Possessive Behavior, Revenge, Siblings, Stockholm Syndrome, Vendettas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-06
Updated: 2012-09-18
Packaged: 2017-11-13 16:53:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 20
Words: 38,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Resident Evil 5 AU. That night at the Spencer Mansion, Chris is the one to fall with Wesker, not Jill. Three years later, BSAA Agent Claire is assigned to a mission in a small area of West Africa called 'Kijuju' . . .</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Don't Fret, Precious

He felt . . . _pain_. It had become his world.

It hurt to move.

It hurt to breathe.

It hurt to think.

There was a sick pounding in his head, centering around a spot high on his temple. Something warm trickled down from it, running into his eyes and mouth.

He couldn't taste.

He couldn't see.

The painful new world he found himself in was filled only with blurs. He could see darkness stretching on forever, broken only by a light up, up, up in the distance. The light was part of something larger, something he could see a vague outline of. He knew what it was, but the answer skimmed around the edge of his consciousness, unwilling to penetrate his haze.

Maybe he was dead. Maybe the light was an angel and the outline heaven.

Maybe she'd be coming for him soon, to lead him there.

Unbidden, the image of a woman popped into his mind, a young brunette wearing a pink jacket. She was smiling at him, reaching towards him, saying something.

The image made him happy, made some of the pain fade.

Was she the angel?

No, no. She was Claire.

She was his little sister.

If only she was there with him, he might not have been so confused, so afraid, so cold. He didn't want to be alone.

"Claire," he tried to say, but like everything else, speaking hurt. And his mouth muscles were unwilling to obey him, so all that came out was a strangled, gargling cry.

Claire never responded. Someone else did.

"Still alive, are we, Redfield?" The voice was mocking and cruel and so familiar, but the ringing in his head made it impossible to place.

"And here I was," it continued, "about to celebrate your demise."

A face entered his line of vision. It was a blond man with sharp, handsome features. A pair of twisted and cracked sunglasses hung precariously off his face, but in the next instant he reached up and threw them away.

Underneath, his eyes were red.

Chris Redfield remembered that eyes weren't supposed to be that color. He also remembered that cuts weren't supposed to go from open to closed and then completely healed in a matter of seconds, but the numerous ones on this man's face had, as he watched, done just that.

"But, perhaps, I'm more pleased with things the way they are."

Chris Redfield remembered betrayal. He remembered anger and hate and fear.

The man leaned down, placing his hand against Chris's battered face. "It's time to introduce you to my world, Christopher."

Christopher Redfield remembered Albert Wesker, but when he tried to scream, all that came out was another bloody gurgle.


	2. Be A Much Better Sight With You, With Me

The phone rang at precisely 3:00 AM.

Claire Redfield groaned, rolled over, and shoved a pillow over her head in a futile attempt to drown out its obscenely loud blaring, but it was no use. Blinking blearily, she removed the pillow and raised her head, reaching out and feeling blindly around the nightstand until her hand hit the phone. She put the receiver to her ear.

"Do you have any idea what time it is?" she demanded, forgoing 'hello'.

There was a brief pause. "One minute past three in the morning, if this clock is right. But, just as a fast little fact, did you know that it's eight o'clock in the morning in West Africa?"

Claire blinked, uncomprehending. "West . . .? Jill, what?"

She heard the movement of papers on the other end of the line, then Jill's reply: "I'm at Headquarters right now, and you should join me as soon as possible. There's a mission for you."

"Me?" she repeated, suddenly alert. With some effort, she shuffled the phone around in her hands and sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. "Is it an outbreak?"

"No . . ." said Jill, though she was too hesitant for Claire's liking. "We don't really know what it is at this time. Just come in and we'll give you a briefing."

After Jill hung up, Claire stared at the phone and wondered why she'd joined the BSAA in the first place. The organization's mission, to eradicate bioterrorism, was one she fervently supported. However, by becoming an agent, she was undoubtedly setting herself up to witness more violence, more innocent people's lives destroyed by viruses. Hadn't Raccoon and Rockfort and Antarctica and Harvardville been enough? Ten years later, and she sometimes still even had nightmares about Mister X and his blank, lifeless eyes and Nosferatu ascending the steps towards her, emerging from the snow and sprouting razor sharp tentacles from his back.

There was only so much she could take. She wasn't a violent person by nature, she didn't have any type of particular fondness for guns.

But yet, she'd resigned from Terrasave, the only peaceful option in the fight against biohazards. She'd enjoyed working there, she'd felt like she was making a difference, helping people in her own way, but she'd quit and instead sent her resume to the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance.

She'd done it because she knew that one day, no matter how many years it took, working for them would eventually lead her to Albert Wesker. One day, she'd find him.

And then . . .  _then_  . . .

The crunching of a water bottle being smashed made Claire look down and realize that her hand was trembling. It was wrapped tightly around the bottle, which she'd half-emptied the night before. Now the water level had risen almost back to the top, the plastic contorted messily in the middle.

Taking a drink and discarding it into the wastebasket, Claire stood and turned on the light, wondering what, exactly, was so urgent that it couldn't wait three more hours until morning.

.

Jill was waiting for her in the lobby of the BSAA Headquarters, a Styrofoam cup of coffee clutched in her hand and a thin smile on her face.

"They're selling them around the corner," she said in greeting, holding the beverage up. "Want one?"

"No thanks," she said, waving it off.

"You sure? Because . . . it's going to be a long day, Claire."

Claire narrowed her eyes as they started towards the lobby's main elevator. "And what, exactly, will make it 'long'?"

Jill said nothing as she hit the 'up' button. The BSAA building was seven stories tall, with different departments housed on each floor. Information and Recruitment was on the first, with Administration on the top and others such as Science and Research on the levels in between.

Once inside the elevator, Jill pressed the button for 'six'. Intelligence.

The Intelligence Division handled thousands of investigations into suspected bioterrorism, making sure that there was an actual problem before money and manpower was expended on taking things further. Those in Intelligence also were the ones who usually handed down missions to the actual agents. Claire had a feeling she wouldn't be going home anytime soon.

Jill led her through several twisting hallways, past dark, empty rooms of cube farms and finally to an office door.

She opened it, and Claire was greeted by the harsh glare of a projector.

"You must be Claire Redfield."

" _You must be the lovely Claire Redfield_  . . ."

Claire shook the sudden echo out of her mind and turned toward the owner of the voice, squinting her eyes to adjust to the dark room. The projector's light only focused on a screen several feet in front of it, leaving the rest of the area around it pitch black. In one of those areas stood a smiling blond man, the one who had spoken. His hands rested on the back of a chair where a pretty Asian woman sat, typing away at a laptop computer.

"I've heard quite a lot about you," he continued. "Raccoon City survivors are hard to come by, after all."

"Claire, this is Agent McGivern, Head of Intel." Jill gestured unnecessarily.

"You can call me Bruce," he said simply, motioning for her to sit down.

She did so, thinking that the name 'Bruce McGivern' was slightly familiar but that she was too tired to even attempt to place it.

"Yoko," said Bruce, nodding at the woman, who yawned hugely.

"Too early," Claire heard her mutter under her breath. "Fong Ling should be here instead of me, but  _no_  . . ."

Yoko hit a button on the keyboard and an image appeared on the projector screen. It was the scrawny face of a young man. His brown hair was unkempt and his chin was covered in a five o'clock shadow. That, accompanied with his beady eyes, didn't give Claire a good first impression. For some reason, she was even slightly reminded of William Birkin.

"Doctor Ricardo Irving," said Bruce. "A native of Saint Kitts and Nevis, thirty two years old. He just recently came on the BSAA's radar in conjunction with reports of . . . strange . . . goings on in a small area in West Africa, called the Kijuju Autonomous Zone. Kijuju was Irving's last known place of residence. He worked at an oil field there."

"Strange happenings?" asked Claire, flicking her eyes away from the screen.

Bruce laced his fingers together. "The Kijuju government has built a wall around the center of the area's most densely populated section. They don't know what's going on, exactly, but they say people are becoming very violent. People are being murdered in the street, public executions are being held. Animal carcasses litter the roads."

"That doesn't sound like zombies," she said, feeling like she was stating the obvious. "They don't have enough intelligence to arrange an execution. They just eat. If anything, I'd say this is rioting. Is it a politically volatile area?"

"Yes," Bruce confirmed, nodding. "But . . ." He nodded at Yoko again. She hit another button on the keyboard and the projector snapped to the next image.

The first thing Claire registered was that the people in the photo were hacking a small animal to death with axes and sickles. Blood and gore was flying everywhere, into the people's faces and onto their clothes; some had even splashed onto the camera's lens. It was a still shot, but she could tell that the thing they were chopping at had still been alive from the motion blurs.

Yoko pressed the button again, then again and again, until the screen was moving from photo to photo at a rapid pace. The photographer had obviously been taking one picture after another, not letting any time pass in between them.

He'd probably been terrified.

Claire was sick to her stomach, but she watched unblinkingly as the animal was butchered into an unidentifiable, unmoving lump of flesh.

Then, in a series of flashes as the photos changed, she watched one of the nearest men turn their head, lowering his axe and looking in the direction of the photographer.

Yoko stopped pressing the button.

Claire was left staring at the man's sickly yellow eyes.

"These photos were given to the West African Branch of the BSAA a short time ago. No one knows who took them, but they've been verified as authentic."

Claire knew that normal people could have yellow eyes. Amber. It was a color, just like blue or green or grey.

But these weren't natural. They were glassy and unseeing, the pupils clouded and the whites bloodshot. The irises themselves were tinted orange, glowing with intensity.

They were zombie eyes.

"We're going on the assumption that there has been an outbreak of some unknown viral agent. And, as it so happens, Doctor Irving is in the habit of selling biological weapons to terrorists. One of his clients is Miguel Grande, apparently. The dictator of the Republic of Nagiri, you know? The BSAA believes that he has something to do with what's going on in Kijuju. It's too much of a coincidence for him not to be. And that, Agent Redfield, is where you come into the picture. We're sending in our Alpha Team for this—we believe Irving is going to be having another weapons deal going down fairly soon and we're hoping to catch him unawares. However, he's going to inevitably notice the BSAA's presence and flee. So, we're hoping that by sending you to Kijuju first . . ."

"It will make him think I'm the only agent looking for him?"

"Exactly." McGivern's smile, which had faded while they looked at the photos, returned in full force.

She blinked. "I . . . guess that makes sense."

"In a convoluted way," Jill muttered.

"But . . . if this is in Africa, why is the BSAA sending an American? As you mentioned, there's a branch over there."

"A small branch, yes. Too small, considering how much of a hot spot Africa is. They're very busy, Redfield. They've specifically asked us to send someone to help, someone experienced. And, you and Agent Valentine are the two most experienced people here. But we can't send her, for obvious reasons."

Jill scowled. "If the mission takes too long, I can postpone it. Carlos would understand."

"It's nice of you to offer, but I'd still feel bad about interrupting your  _wedding_  plans. You only get married once, Valentine." He smirked. "Hopefully."

"This is more important," she gritted out. "Lives are at stake."

"I'm confident Redfield can handle it, Valentine. And besides, she won't be going it alone. The West African Branch is sending their own agent to accompany her. I hear she's good. Young . . . but good."

He turned back to Claire, handing her a manila file that had been sitting next to Yoko's computer. In bold letters on the front were the words: 'Kijuju, West Africa'.

"Your flight leaves in an hour and a half."

.

After Claire left, Jill turned to McGivern and glared.

"Shouldn't you have mentioned something?" she demanded, picking up her coffee cup but stopping herself from drinking. What little of it remained had to have been freezing.

McGivern shrugged. "I didn't feel the need. We need her at her best; we can't be upsetting her over rumors."

"What if it's not a rumor?" she hissed. "What if—"

"There are lots of blond men in the world, Valentine. Just because someone, somewhere claims Irving happens to be working with one doesn't mean anything."

"Wesker killed her brother."

"I'm aware of what happened to Chris Redfield."

"But you have no idea how it affected her. They were so close. It—it was like something died in Claire, too. I hate Wesker with every fiber of my being, but Claire . . . Claire _loathes_  him. It's been hard ever since that night."

She still remembered Chris falling, remembered the instant of pure helplessness she had experienced as his silhouette had dropped further and further away, towards the inevitable collision with the ground.

And she hadn't been able to do anything except lie there on the library floor with the broken glass and  _watch_.

McGivern's expression softened. "I can't imagine. I've never lost a sibling. But telling Redfield that Albert Wesker  _might_  be in Kijuju when it's almost certain that he isn't would just add problems to this. Instead of trying to find Irving, who knows what she might do?"

"Claire's more professional than that. She'll catch him no matter what."

He shook his head. "We just need to resolve this before it becomes an . . . incident. The BSAA wants it done as quickly as possible."

"Wesker is incredibly dangerous, McGivern. You've never met him, you don't know—he can dodge  _bullets_. He can snap a man's neck with one hand. If he's there and Claire—"

"Come on, Valentine. You're getting paranoid. It's not like you."

"Like you know me so well," she said sourly. It wasn't that she didn't like McGivern; he actually managed to be a competent commander without being a hardass. Hell, he was invited to her wedding. However, he was suddenly grating on her nerves.

In the last years especially, she'd become close to Claire. Maybe she'd been trying to fill the gap Chris had left. But whatever the reason, she didn't want her to be thrust into a situation she was unprepared for simply because McGivern didn't want to talk about something that may or may not be true.

But, it was too late now. Claire was probably boarding her plane.

She should've said something.

"Don't worry," said McGivern, standing up and stretching. "Redfield'll go, help arrest Irving, and be back for the rehearsal dinner. Investigating possible outbreaks and arresting bioterrorists is what we do, Valentine, if you forgot. It's all routine."


	3. Cry, Little Sister

If Claire had seen herself, she thought she would've been suspicious.

Normal people didn't stand in graveyards before dawn, talking to headstones.

However, that was what she was doing.

"I guess I shouldn't be here right now. I'm leaving for Africa in an hour," she said, leaning down and rubbing some dirt away from the stone's base. "Another mission."

Three years ago, after Chris fell, they hadn't had a body to bury. They'd searched, but his remains had never been found.

For some reason, it hurt her more that there was nothing left. She didn't even have a lock of his hair.

She hadn't been able to say goodbye, even to a corpse.

Now, all that remained of him was this headstone.

She always visited it once a week at least, sometimes more. She talked to it like she was talking to something living, telling it every little thing that happened in her life. She thought that maybe, somewhere, Chris heard it.

She always visited right before she went on a mission. For awhile, she hadn't known why she felt so compelled, but then she realized that each time, consciously or no, she was renewing a promise.

_If he's there, Chris, if I find him . . ._

She'd been saying that for three years, but Wesker was never there. It was like he'd died with Chris, been washed away in that river below the Spencer Mansion along with her brother's body.

A part of her hoped that maybe it was true, that maybe Wesker had somehow met his end without her even knowing about it, that he'd passed into oblivion without hurting anymore people.

But another, darker part rebelled against that. She wanted, no,  _needed_  to be there, to see his final moments, to watch the life drain out of his eyes. She wanted to  _cause_  his death.

But Claire didn't like to think about that dark part of herself, and instead, she talked to Chris's gravestone.

"They want me to help catch a man named Irving. An arms dealer. I think you know what kind of weapons he sells."

Fighting back a sudden pricking sensation behind her eyes, she leant heavily against the stone. It was something she was accustomed to, however. No matter how much she fought it, she always ended up crying when she visited, just a little bit.

"It's been so hard since—since you fell, Chris. So many people have died. More and more I find myself wondering if there's anything left worth fighting for. But . . . I'm fighting anyway, Chris, for you. I'm still fighting because I know that that's what you would've done. Are you . . . are you proud of me?"

She wiped at her eyes, wishing desperately he was there to respond but knowing that Chris would never say anything ever again.

_If he's there, if he's there_  . . .

Shutting her eyes tightly, she forced her emotions under control and turned away, clenching her fists by her side. "Don't worry, Chris. I'll be back soon."

.

While waiting to board her flight, Claire dialed a number on her cell phone and prayed no one would pick up. No one did.

" _Hi, this is Leon, I'm not in right now so please leave a message after the tone_  . . ."

"Hi, Leon," she began awkwardly. "Um . . . I'm at the airport right now. I've got a new mission—to Africa. Jill will tell you more. If you want to reach me . . ." She hesitated. "They said I should get some reception out there, so just call my work number. Bye."

She hung up quickly, sliding the phone into her pocket. Recently, she and Leon didn't speak very much, but she felt she had to tell him where she was going just in case.

Swallowing heavily, she turned her attention to the file in her hands. Inside was a slightly longer version of what McGivern had told her, as well as copies of the photos she'd viewed on the projector. Irving still looked slimy even when sized down.

All in all, the information wasn't very useful, not that she'd been expecting it to be. The only pleasant surprise she'd found was that Dan DeChant's team was going to be leading the operation. She'd worked with him on several occasions before, and he always came through.

It made her feel slightly better, enough that she even managed to smile at the stewardess as she boarded the plane that would take her to Africa.

Maybe this would turn out to be a safari.


	4. Counting Bodies Like Sheep

Wesker had once told him that it took three billion years for humans to evolve. Life spent millenniums as nothing more than bacteria, insentient microorganisms, but eventually it grew and grew until cells became complicated and new species came into existence.

It was pathetic, Wesker said, that after three billion years all there was to show for it were humans.

There were so many of them, everywhere you went. They were like cancer cells, or a colony of insects, going about their pointless lives in ignorance of the bigger picture. None of them knew how unimportant they were, or how easily their lives could be snuffed out.

Three billion years, he said, and the only result was  _that_.

Natural selection didn't exist anymore. The weak survived to pass on their genes and create more weak.

Humans were losing millions of years of evolution each day, and they didn't even realize it.

But now, things were changing.

 _Evolution_  was taking place right before his very eyes.

And it was such a simple process.

The man screamed and struggled like he was fighting for his life, like something horrible was about to happen to him. He stammered wildly, flailing his head from side to side and clenching his teeth, his hands batting upward, hitting the other man on top of him.

Chris Redfield just smiled. He'd seen this happen time and time again in the lab, and they  _all_ fought.

They didn't know. They were becoming something  _greater_.

This, however, was the first time Chris had ever done this personally.

"Don't worry," he soothed, pushing down forcefully on the man's chest. He heard a rib crack underneath his hand.

Sometimes he forgot his own strength.

"Don't worry," he repeated, this time over the man's pained scream. "It won't hurt."

Then he was steadying himself and sliding the needle into the man's abdomen, small drops of blood welling up from the pinprick. Chris had hardly gone to medical school; he didn't know very much about giving shots, but then again, there wasn't very much to it.

Soon, the thin syringe was entirely empty and he withdrew it, slowly standing and sliding it into a dispenser, keeping one eye on the man as he did so. He was struggling to his knees, the look on his face purely panicked. His fingers went to the injection sight, gingerly brushing it.

Chris knew that, at this very moment inside of him, Uroboros was traversing his bloodstream, saturating his organs and forcing its way into the nuclei of his cells, where the DNA was.

It would then determine whether or not the DNA was compatible, and the host's body would change accordingly.

And, judging from the way the man was beginning to cringe in pain, and the way his eyes were changing color, the whites going black, Chris was able to say with some certainty that Uroboros had not found a match.

"It appears you aren't compatible," he said, rather mournfully, though he doubted the man actually understood English.

He turned away as the man's skin began to tear itself apart, willowy black tentacles emerging from his body. His arm flew out, grasping at the edge of Chris's sleeve. Chris sidestepped it easily, swinging around with his other arm and shoving the man to the floor.

He collided with the ground with a squishy crack and began convulsing, screams of agony flying from his mouth. Tentacles pushed out from behind his eyes, popping the balls. He was becoming one huge, writhing mass of the things.

Failures, Chris decided as he strode out of the room, were so  _ugly_.

.

Albert Wesker thought Ricardo Irving's laugh was of the most annoying things he had ever heard, second only to perhaps Alfred Ashford's. In fact, the same could be said about the man's voice, and it didn't even have anything to do with his accent.

"What a wonderful failure," Irving said in between cackles, watching the television monitor in front of him closely. On it, Chris was slamming the metal door behind him, locking the creature into the room. It now bore no resemblance to its original host; in fact, Wesker thought it looked something like a pile of snakes sliding over each other.

Uroboros was such a fitting name.

"I don't think we've ever even had something this  _big_  before," Irving continued, his scraggly face contorting in a smile.

The tentacles were slowly taking shape, forming a vague outline of limbs. It staggered forward, its gate unsteady. Some of the mass disconnected, slithering up the walls and over the ceiling.

Wesker briefly pulled his gaze away at the sound of approaching footsteps. "Chris," he said in acknowledgement, barely glancing over his shoulder.

Chris turned his attention to the monitor, his eyes narrowing. "Another failure," he said unnecessarily, pursing his lips.

Irving clapped his hands together abruptly. "It's perfect."

"For what, pray tell?" Wesker demanded, cracking his knuckles. It was an old habit from his days spent working with Birkin, one that had carried over.

Irving's smile widened, revealing several more of his yellow teeth. "For catching a few little BSAA Agents. You know they're going to be sending them sooner or later. They think I'm meeting with General Grande's men tomorrow afternoon, and that's probably when they'll arrive, the nosy bastards. You can't do anything without them breathing down your neck, bitching about international law . . ."

"I'm aware of what the BSAA will do."

"So, why not see how well they're training their agents these days, eh? A zombie's one thing. This is another, doncha think?"

"You're to stop the agents at any cost, Irving," Wesker snapped, "not play games with them. Overconfidence will only lead to problems."

Irving laughed his way to the exit. "Oh, this'll stop them, Wesker, no matter how many they send . . ."

Chris glared at him as he moved down the hallway and disappeared around a corner, still muttering to himself. "Slime."

"Yes," Wesker agreed, sincere. "But for the time being, we must deal with him."

Pouting slightly, Chris sidled up next to him, leaning down and pressing his lips against Wesker's. "But you'll let me kill him eventually, won't you?" he pleaded, his breath mingling with the other man's as his arms went up around his shoulders.

Wesker smirked indulgently, standing and pushing Chris up onto the desk. His back pressed up against the monitor, where the thing was now dissolving and slithering across the ground in pieces, then reassembling itself in another part of the room.

"Soon, dear heart," Wesker murmured, nipping his way up Chris's neck. "Very, very soon . . ."


	5. Tender Sugar

This 'Agent Redfield' was running late. Sheva didn't appreciate that, considering that it was approximately a hundred degrees outside and one of the guards kept throwing her lewd looks.

She'd arrived in Kijuju around an hour ago, and Redfield was apparently supposed to be there at about the same time.

But, he wasn't, and so she was left standing there in the shade the newly built wall provided, mentally going over what she'd been told by her superiors. The majority of it was rather cut-and-dry: a suspected weapons smuggler and an illegal deal with terrorists about to happen. She'd dealt with that so many times she'd lost count.

But then, there was the wall.

The new government in Kijuju was shaky at best, but yet they'd managed to pool their resources and build a forty two foot reinforced concrete wall around the middle of their most densely populated area, and then post guards around it.

Officially, they blamed 'uncontrolled rioting' for the drastic measures they had taken.

Sheva wasn't so sure. The BSAA didn't believe it, either, nor did Josh, who had loudly disagreed when she'd been assigned to the mission. In turn, their superiors had told him that she wasn't going to be going in alone to apprehend Irving; apparently, the West African BSAA was working in cooperation with the North American Branch on this one.

They said the primary reason they were doing so was that they were short on resources, though Sheva thought it might've had more to do with several reports they had received that claimed at least three or four Caucasians were working with Irving.

But, whatever the reason, here she was, waiting on Redfield.

And, it appeared that he was finally there, as a large Jeep with a BSAA Emblem on the side was approaching slowly.

Wiping sweat off her brow, she stepped into the sunlight and started towards the car, silently going over her English again as she walked. She'd spoke it fluently but it had been awhile.

Halfway to the car, however, she paused and frowned.

A woman was emerging from the driver's seat. She was a petite brunette wearing a short sleeved red jacket with an odd design on the back.

She turned around abruptly and stared at her, blinking. "Yes?"

"I'm Sheva Alomar, from the BSAA. You must be . . . Agent Redfield?"

She smiled. "Yes, but call me 'Claire'. So you're the partner they told me about, huh?"

The BSAA was a male dominated organization, and sometimes Sheva forgot that there were, in fact, other women that worked there. It was a pleasant surprise that she'd be partnered with one.

"Yes, that's me. Tensions have been running high ever since the change in government, so it's in your best interest to have me accompany you. No one will be very happy to see an American, BSAA or not."

"Oh . . ." Claire said, frowning deeply. "Why not? I'm just here to help."

"As I said, tension. Political, racial. But don't worry, you'll be fine."

Claire turned back to her car, hooking her keys over the driver's side visor and then shutting the door. "They said I couldn't bring a gun," she said, turning and following Sheva in the direction of the wall's main entrance. People occasionally stopped to stare at them, but they reached it without incident.

"They wouldn't let you past the wall if you were armed," she replied, glancing in the direction of an approaching guard. She noticed with no large amount of surprise that he was the one that had been looking at her earlier.

"Hey, hey!" he shouted, slinging his gun over his shoulder and throwing out his hands to frisk her.

She scowled, slapping him away and pulling several paper money bills out of her pocket. "No need to get touchy."

He scowled back but accepted it, stepping away and letting them pass.

Claire stepped up beside her as the doors began to part, giving them a clear view of an area that looked no different than the one they had just walked through.

"Welcome to Kijuju," Sheva said, and they stepped inside.

.

At first glance, Kijuju seemed quite normal. It was obviously a poor area, but there weren't any barricades, fires, or moaning undead to be seen.

However, then Claire noticed something that was off. A distance down the street, group of men were beating a wiggling bag with sticks, shouting at it. It took her a moment to fully process what she was seeing, and by that time they had stopped and were staring at her unblinkingly, their weapons still held tightly in their hands.

Sheva nudged her along, shaking her head. "Don't bother them," she whispered.

"But there's something  _alive_  in there—"

"I know, but we're not here for that. The BSAA doesn't want us stirring anything up."

"But—"

"Come on."

Flustered, Claire kept walking, turning her gaze away sharply when they went back to what they'd been doing. The bag was now making sounds of its own.

She sped up her pace, wishing fervently she had a weapon and feeling truly happy for the first time that she wasn't alone. Something about the calm, cold way they were doing it just . . . chilled her.

"This is Kirk _,_ " a voice crackled over her radio. She pulled it out of her pocket to hear more clearly. "Claire, Sheva, can you hear me?"

She'd met Kirk Mathison when she'd arrived in Africa. He'd been nice enough, but she just hoped he was a competent pilot. She had never forgotten that story Jill had told her once about Chickenheart Vickers, and she'd been a bit paranoid ever since.

"We can hear you, Kirk," said Sheva. "Quite clearly."

Kirk laughed. "Uh-huh. The stingy bastards at HQ just got off their asses and installed brand new equipment in here. Now you can hear me in high def. So, uh, how about dinner, Sheva?"

"The mission, Kirk," she snapped. "Our weapons?"

He made a dissatisfied noise. "Fine. There's a black market weapons deal going down in Kijuju. That's where Irving will be. Alpha Team has already infiltrated the area and you'll be going in as back up."

"Glad they're telling us all this new information," Claire muttered.

"Rendezvous with your contact at the local butcher's shop. You can gear up and get briefed on the mission there. Watch your backs!"

"Roger that."

"We copy. Over and out."

Claire slipped her radio back into her pocket, and Sheva directed her in the direction of a storefront with a sign above it that read, "For Fresh and Quality Meat: Corner Pyamy Butchery'.

Claire slowly approached it, but Sheva suddenly grabbed her shoulder, halting her progress.

"What's that noise?" she asked, her eyebrows drawing together.

Tilting her head downwards, Claire listened carefully and heard what she was talking about. The sound was quiet at first, but it began building until it seemed to be coming from everywhere, pounding in her ears.

"An air raid siren?" Claire had never heard one outside of television, but everyone knew what they sounded like. Though, glancing around, she didn't see any speakers where it could be coming from.

And, it wasn't just a siren—someone was talking as well, loudly, in a foreign language.

She spun around to scan the other side of the area, but she promptly decided finding the source didn't matter when she took in the abandoned streets.

"Everyone's . . . gone?"

She'd seen maybe fifteen or twenty people during the walk from the gate to the butcher shop, but now there was no one there. It was like they'd all just disappeared, and now Kijuju looked like a ghost town.

"That's odd," said Sheva stiffly.

Claire swallowed convulsively and started towards the shop's door. "I want my gun."

.

Reynard Fisher didn't look like a weapons dealer or a butcher, but at least he seemed more normal than some of the other people she'd seen.

"It may be because of the new government," he said, leading them through the back of his shop, "but people around here are a little on edge. You should do what you came to do and go home."

"On edge," she repeated. "I think that's the wrong term for it."

He shrugged. "Strange things have been happening for awhile now. If I could leave, lady, trust me I would. But I'm stuck here because of that wall." He gestured to a metal attaché case lying out on a counter. "Your weapons."

Sheva opened it, revealing two knives and two Beretta M92Fs. It was a decent handgun, though it hardly had a large amount of firepower. She preferred magnums herself, but she'd take what she could get.

She picked hers up and checked the clip, finding it fully loaded.

"Destination coordinates?" Sheva asked, doing the same.

"Town square up ahead. Go through it and you'll find the deal's location. Alpha Team's waiting."

"Good . . ." she said, pocketing several spare clips.

Reynard hesitated, looking at them intently. "What do you know about . . . Uroboros?"

Claire looked up sharply. She'd heard the name mentioned several times by her superiors, and it always seemed to bring with it horrific rumors of a mass outbreak, some type of hastening of the apocalypse. But, nothing was ever confirmed.

"Some type of project," she replied. "An end of the world sort of thing. But it's just a rumor so far."

"'End of the world'," Reynard repeated, laughing humorlessly. "Sounds about right. And apparently, it is no rumor."

Sheva lowered her gun, her eyes widening fractionally. "You're kidding, right?"

Reynard waved her off, turning and walking towards the door. "You must find Irving. He is our only lead." He stepped through the threshold and shut it behind him, leaving them alone.

"End of the world," Sheva murmured. "Who would do something like that?"

Claire had personally met several people who she thought would jump at the chance, though now all of them were dead . . . except one.

Though hopefully, he would be dying sometime soon.

 _Her hands around Wesker's throat, her gun against his head, her knife digging into his chest_ —

"Well, come on," said Sheva, sighing. She pulled her GPS out of her pocket and looked at it briefly. "The town square doesn't seem to be very far from here."

"Anxious to get it over with?" Claire asked, following her out of the building. On the way, she spared a glance at one of the slabs of meat sitting out. Flies buzzed around it and it smelled like a zombie.

_Fresh and quality meat, indeed . . ._

Sheva shrugged. "I guess you could say that. I always get a little nervous before each mission."

"That's normal. So do I." It was the realization that there was always a possibility of things going horribly wrong that made her that way. There were so many little variables, and any one of them could spell failure or death.

Things usually turned out fine, but she could never shake the pre-mission jitters.

An awkward silence descended on them, until a wicked smile suddenly came over Sheva's face. "But, I also want to get home because I was planning to go out with my friends this weekend. I have my outfit picked out and everything."

She grinned. "Oh, really? What's it look like?"

"Lots of gold."

Shaking her head, Claire started down a flight of steps leading off the shop's lot, only to slow her pace, the smile fading.

At the bottom there laid what looked to be a small cow or a goat. Crows picked at the body, focusing on several open wounds, one of which still had a stake sticking out of it. It was missing its head.

The birds flew off when they reached the bottom.

"That's disgusting," Sheva said, edging around it.

That was an understatement, but Claire couldn't help but feel sorry for it.

It looked like McGivern had been right about animal carcasses being all over the place.

"Let's proceed very cautiously, okay?"

Sheva nodded, and they started forward, only to find that their route was blocked by a chain link fence that had been reinforced with pieces of wood.

"I guess we can't climb over it?"

Claire glanced up at the awning of an adjoining building, which constricted the space above the fence, and then at the top of the fence itself, which had several sharp, rusty points sticking up.

"I don't think so."

They backtracked back to the goat, and Sheva pointed at a nearby building which had the front door sitting open. "Maybe we can cut through there?"

Claire stepped inside, grimacing as she passed by a shelf of human skulls. Candles burned around them, dripping wax onto the floor.

In the adjacent room, the first thing she noticed was the smell. It was of death, rotting flesh, something that she'd become very familiar with since Raccoon City.

It came from yet another dead animal, which was strung up on a table in the center of the room. Its stomach had been sliced open.

"Was it for some type of ritual?" Sheva asked, putting a hand over her nose.

"I can't even imagine . . ." she said, leaning heavily against a countertop. She glanced down and frowned, picking up a sheet of paper that had been written on in what she hoped was just brownish red ink. She couldn't understand what it said; she assumed it was written in Swahili.

"Sheva, what does this say?" She handed it to the other woman, who squinted at it.

"'All outsiders will . . . receive the blade of punishment'," she read slowly. "'We will bless them with sacred death. We will release them from their bonds of wickedness.'"

"You said something about Americans not being welcome around here?" she said, smiling grimly.

Sheva threw the paper back onto the counter. "Apparently they're more xenophobic than I thought. Or at least, someone is."

Claire shuddered, heading for the door on the other side of the room. "Why don't we get out of here?"

Outside was a dusty alleyway that looked practically identical to the one they'd just been in, minus the dead goat.

Sheva consulted her GPS again. "We need to keep going east for about a mile and then—"

She was cut off by a scream.

Claire spun around, her attention focused on a two story building across from her. "It's coming from there!" she shouted, darting up a nearby set of stairs and throwing herself flat against the wall. Sheva took the opposite side, and after a second's pause, they nodded at each other.

Claire kicked the door in and ran inside, prepared to perform a sweep of the room. However, she didn't have to look for the source of the scream; he was right on the ground in front of her.

He was being held down by two other men, one of whom was holding something— _something—_

It was round, like a rock, with small wiggling tentacles sprouted out from its center mass. It moved as though it had a life of its own, and as they watched, one of the men forced it into the other's mouth, shoving it down past his lips.

"Freeze!" Claire ordered, shocked. "Freeze, now!"

Slowly, one of the men pulled away and turned to face her, giving her a glimpse of something else, something coming out of his mouth as well, like hideous flower petals.

But then it retracted inside, and he was scowling at her. He pulled himself up and darted away, leaving the man on the floor by himself. He rolled over, shaking his head back and forth and gagging. A long string of goo hung out of his mouth.

"Are you okay?" Claire asked, even though she was hesitant to approach him. The last time she'd walked up to someone she'd thought was in distress, she'd wound up being chased out of a diner by a zombie.

And that same feeling of wrongness that she'd experienced then, right before the man had turned around to reveal his bloody, decaying face, was suddenly back in full force for the first time in ten years.

She began backing away, her finger slipping over the trigger of her gun. "Sir? Are you . . . alright?"

The man abruptly tossed his head back, a scream ripping its way out of his throat as the blood vessels in his eyes ruptured and blood began running down his face.

There was the answer to her question.

"Sheva," she shouted, "get away from him! Now!"

Sheva had been walking towards him, her hand outstretched. "But he's—"

And then, in the next instant, the man was on his feet, snarling wildly and charging directly at them.


	6. The Noose

Sherry had been watching executions for around two months now, and she was beginning to wonder when they'd run out of people to kill.

Assimilation rates had been high. She knew that first hand; after all, she'd helped spread the parasite back in January, when they'd first begun the field tests. And the majority of the people that hadn't been able to accept the Plagas had died.

But yet, almost every day there was yet another uninfected person being publicly beheaded.

Sherry had started watching out of a morbid sense of fascination, a desire to see the results of something Wesker had spent so much time developing, but over time, it had evolved into something of a routine: whenever she heard the siren and the Agitator's voice over her radio, she came to the town square along with the rest of the villagers.

Who the Agitator really was, or how he was different from a normal Majini, Sherry didn't know. She'd only even nicknamed him because every time he talked, everyone seemed to get very agitated.

He always presided over the executions, megaphone in hand. She didn't speak Swahili fluently, so she couldn't understand most of what he was saying, but the crowd around her always seemed to enthusiastically agree.

However, she caught the word 'outsiders' several times, always spoken with a burning disgust. It made her nervous.

After all, how much more of an outsider could she have been? She'd been born in Raccoon City, for God's sake.

But, they never paid any attention to her. No one ever even glanced in her direction.

It was the same with Chris, whenever Wesker let him go out into the village on his own (which admittedly wasn't very often). It was like, to the Majini, they were invisible.

Wesker said it was because he'd given them the command to ignore his agents. And whatever he ordered, they did.

But it didn't serve to make her any less nervous. Viruses, even parasites, were volatile, and the human mind was strong, maybe stronger than Wesker give it credit for.

She always kept her gun loaded and ready, just in case.

"Hmm, what do we have here . . .? Oh, excellent form but a little rough on the landing. I'd say, eight out of ten for the purple vest lady."

Sherry pulled her radio out of her pocket, glancing up at the bloody wooden platform that was used for all the beheadings. The Executioner wasn't even there yet, so it obviously wasn't going to start for a few minutes.

"What is it, Burnside?" she demanded, silently wishing for a water bottle. Her mouth was so parched it almost hurt to talk.

Burnside was another agent of Wesker's, one she'd recently been introduced to, though she didn't like him very much. He was too arrogant and immature to do anything effectively, much less be her partner.

But, despite her protests, Wesker had paired them up for the tests in Africa. She thought he was just doing it to spite her, not that she'd ever done anything to him to deserve it.

"I spy . . . well, what looks like two more BSAA Agents. Imagine that. They sent backup for their team. And two little girls, too . . ."

"The BSAA works in pairs of two as well as large teams. You know that much, don't you?"

"Of course I do!" She could hear the defensiveness just dripping from his voice.

"Then this shouldn't be a surprise. What do they look like? Are they American, like the team?"

Steve snickered. "Can't tell. They're running from a horde. Look at 'em go! I don't think I've ever seen anyone move that fast in my life."

"A horde? Where are you?"

"Where are  _you_?"

She almost growled in frustration. "I'm in the town square. They're about to have an execution, like they do almost every day. Didn't you hear the radio?"

"Well, our girls are headed your way. They've barricaded themselves in a building, but I know it's got a passage that leads to your position. Hell, it's how I usually get there."

"Didn't their superiors send them a map?"

"Who knows, who cares? I don't think they're going to be alive for much longer anyway, since there's got to be what? Half the population of the village in the town square, all with axes ready? Not to mention the Executioner?"

Speaking of him . . .

He was huge, maybe eight or nine feet tall. He wore a bloody black apron and red gloves, with an eyeless hood over his head. Innumerable thick metal nails protruded from his skin, blood oozing from the resulting puncture wounds.

He didn't seem to notice them, moving with a mechanical ease as he walked up onto the platform, dragging his huge axe with him.

Sherry shivered despite the heat.

She didn't know how Plagas infection had caused  _that_ , but she hoped dearly he was the only of his kind.

"Yes, he's here," she said, suddenly whispering.

"I love that guy," Steve sighed. "He's so badass."

It had definitely been spite on Wesker's part, she decided as she slammed the radio back into her pocket and turned her full attention onto the platform.

A man was being dragged up to the chopping block by two Majini. Sherry might've vaguely remembered having seen him before, but she didn't even know his name.

The Agitator began talking more rapidly, gesturing down at him.

"You don't know what you're talking about!" the man shouted wildly, struggling against the Majini.

It was rare to see someone with so much fight left in them. The victim was usually paralyzed with fear and therefore silent or, if they still had control over their voice, they begged.

Though, occasionally someone was brave enough to fight. Not that it made any difference.

"You can all go to hell!"

The Agitator nodded, and in one motion it was all over.

Sherry didn't flinch at the sight anymore, but she didn't frantically shout her approval like the crowd around her did, either. What was the point?

The Agitator raised his microphone to give his post-death rallying cry as he usually did, but something made him pause and stare in the direction of a building across the way.

Sherry looked up in the same direction and felt everything come grinding to a halt.

There were two women standing in a window of the building, watching the scene in the town square. One of them, an African woman in a purple vest, she didn't recognize.

But the other . . .

" _Let me go!"_

" _Easy, easy there, I'm not a zombie! You're safe now!"_

"Claire," she breathed.

She'd hadn't seen Claire Redfield for ten years, but how could she have possibly forgotten the woman who had saved her in Raccoon City?

And now, they were both in Kijuju. And Claire happened to be in the BSAA.

Wesker would want to be notified about this immediately.

The Agitator Majini raised his megaphone and pointed at the window, shouting something. Almost as one, the entire crowd turned to look.

Horror dawned on Claire's face.

Sherry bit her lip, watching as the Majini sprung into action, drawing weapons and approaching the building. Things soon dissolved into chaos, gunshots and small explosions coming from what seemed like every direction.

After a few minutes, she ducked out of the town square into a much more peaceful side alley. She wasn't invincible to projectile weapons and fire, after all, even if the Majini were under orders to leave her alone.

Catching her breath from the sprint she'd broken into to reach the exit, she slowly began walking, memories of Raccoon City playing through her mind one after another in rapid succession. The zombies, the police station, the sewers, the feeling of being infected, of her humanity slipping away with every minute that passed, of something squirming inside her body, her blood—

"Oh, thank God!"

Taking a deep, shuddering breath and glancing over her shoulder, she almost rolled her eyes. Two nights ago, Burnside had dragged her into one of the local bars, where she'd briefly been acquainted with a whiny teenage girl named Allyson, who claimed to have been in Kijuju with her boyfriend, for some reason or another. She'd been quite disturbed by the presence of the Agitator, who was rambling very loudly in English about the 'outsiders' and what should be done with them.

Allyson and her 'friend', Adam, apparently thought that that they outsiders should stick together, but she and Burnside had vacated after the inevitable bar fight had begun.

Sherry would've thought she'd have been one of the horde by now, but apparently the annoying ones always lasted.

"You're normal, right? Do you have any idea what's going on here?! Everyone's acting crazy! It—it's like they're possessed, or something! I saw somebody with orange eyes! And—and this guy, he was chasing me!"

She saw the Majini she was talking about a ways behind her, though he hesitated upon seeing Sherry.

So they did know she was there, after all.

"Calm down, Allyson," she said, as soothingly as possible.

"Calm down?!" she shrieked. "How am I supposed to do that?"

Sherry stepped up, grabbing her shoulders. "Because I'm going to help you, alright?"

Allyson blinked slowly. "You are?"

She smiled serenely. "Of course."

And then she shoved Allyson back into the Majini's waiting hands. The girl screamed hysterically, flailing and scratching, but he kept her in a secure hold. "Help! Help me! Please, God, anyone!"

"Oh, but I am helping you. You see, Allyson, we're doing something very important for the world, and its starting right here, in Kijuju. And you're going to become an integral part of it all. We haven't had very many racially diverse subjects, so it should be most interesting to see how this plays out. And once it's over, you won't be afraid anymore."

"You're crazy!" she screamed, her eyes wild. "You're crazy! All of you!"

"Not crazy," said Sherry. "Just progressive."

.

Chris had just unlatched a lock when he heard the rapid clank of military boots against concrete.

"Shit!" Irving exclaimed, immediately turning and making a break for the nearest exit, which happened to be a door on the other side of the room. He had barely taken five steps, however, when the BSAA Team was busting into the room, guns at the ready.

"Ricardo Irving! Freeze! Now!"

"Shit, shit, shit!" he repeated, skidding to a halt and throwing his arms into the air.

Chris almost rolled his eyes. While he could admit there was some merit to Irving's plan, one problem that had just presented itself was that they'd delayed releasing the thing for slightly too long, their fear being that they had no idea what it would do if given full, uninterrupted freedom for a long period of time. That had, in turn, led to this situation.

"And you!" one of the team shouted, his voice ringing vaguely familiar. "Put your hands on your head and turn around, slowly!"

Ah, yes. His name was . . .  _DeChant,_ or something like it. A long, long time ago, in another life, Chris had . . .  _worked_  with him, perhaps been on friendly terms with him. All of those memories were blurry to him now, largely unreachable, but that didn't stop him from understanding that this could be used to his advantage.

BSAA Agents never came into a situation without being heavily armed, and even he couldn't dodge a hail of bullets. Therefore, he would have to take a different approach than direct force.

So, he did as instructed, raising his hands to the back of his head and slowly moving one hundred and eighty degrees.

The look on DeChant's face was priceless. Complete and utter disbelief, the kind that made you practically paralyzed until it dissipated.

"C—Chris?" he stammered, his eyes huge and his gun lowering. "Chris  _Redfield_? It—it  _is_  you! But you—"

"Died?" said Chris, smiling as benevolently as he could. It would only be a matter of seconds before DeChant would begin getting suspicious, but for now, glancing around, he saw several other faces he might've recognized, and each appeared to be experiencing the same emotions as DeChant, who was nodding dumbly and still wearing that comical expression of shock.

Chris could almost  _feel_  DeChant's grip on his gun loosening. Surprise did that to people, no matter how well trained they were. It was a natural reaction.

"That night, at the Spencer Estate, with Albert Wesker? The window? And yet, here I am, right now, in Kijuju, perfectly fine."

DeChant nodded again. "You—but Jill said that—"

Very, very slowly, Chris began to tilt his body to the side, back towards the door.

"Wesker," said Chris, "broke my fall."

And then he was pulling the door open and the creature was lumbering out, extending its tentacles and curling them around the nearest agent, who began firing at it wildly. It seemed to eat the bullets, however, absorbing them into its body even as part of it slithered into the man's mouth and then back out his eyes.

"Retreat!" DeChant screamed, backing up to the doorway as he fired and finally dodging through the threshold to avoid being hit by one of the thing's arms.

Irving was taking the opportunity to run away, practically flying out the door and to the elevator at the end of the adjoining hall, slamming the call button.

Chris followed him at a slower pace, the terrified screams of the BSAA Agents music to his ears.

.

Wesker sat in the dark, five words he'd heard spoken to him ten minutes ago repeating over and over again in his mind.

Sherry Birkin's voice had been shaky when she'd radioed him, and for the majority of the conversation he'd wondered why. She'd grown into a confident girl over the years, and she was never shy about reporting back to him, as she knew was required of her.

But then, she'd said them. Five little words.

Claire Redfield is in Kijuju.

"She's one of the BSAA Agents," the girl had gone on to say, gunshots and shouts echoing in the distance behind her. "She's here to help the team."

Claire Redfield is in Kijuju.

He hadn't even been aware the idiot girl had joined the BSAA. The last he had heard of her, she'd been working for some pointless human rights group called 'Terrasave'.

And preoccupying himself with information that like that become unimportant to him after that night in Ozwell Spencer's Estate. What did it matter to him what Redfield or Valentine did, when Chris was the only one he was concerned with?

Claire Redfield is in Kijuju.

Ten years ago, he'd found her rather amusing to watch. Always running after Chris, trying to 'rescue' him when she was the one who always ended up needing to be rescued instead. It was rather like seeing a car wreck in progress.

Now, however, things had changed, and she was no longer entertaining. Her presence would only serve to complicate things.

Not only did both Burnside and Birkin have prior . . . emotional attachment to her, but so did Chris.

And that was where the amusement ended.

There was no room for a sibling in Chris's world now, simply because  _he_ , Wesker,  _was_  that world.

Scowling darkly, Wesker tapped several buttons on the armrest of his chair and a monitor sprung to life in front of him. The facilities in Africa were hardly as advanced as those he had at home, but he could still tap into all of Umbrella's defunct satellites and use facial recognition software.

It took only one minute and twelve seconds for the machine to subsequently locate Claire Redfield. She was near the town square, which had practically been leveled, walking with another woman wearing a purple vest.

"What were those things?" the woman demanded, breathing heavily. "I don't understand any of this!"

Redfield shook her head, ignoring her in favor of her radio. "HQ! HQ, come in! We need backup, immediately! More than just air support! The situation is much worse than we originally thought! HQ!"

". . . in trouble . . ." a voice crackled in reply. It was accompanied by rapid gunfire. ". . . need backup! Shit! Help! Can't—can't see . . ."

Redfield's eyes widened. "DeChant?!"

"Captain, what is your status? Can you see the enemy?" Wesker didn't recognize the masculine voice now asking the questions.

"No, no! Wait! Goddamn monster—" The transmission dissolved into a strangled scream.

"DeChant!" Redfield shouted. "Do you copy?! Can you hear me?!"

Wesker muted the volume and leaned back in his seat, steepling his fingers. It appeared that Irving's failure had served its purpose with the team, but that didn't mean it would take care of Redfield. In fact, with her experience and monumental amount of luck, he was almost certain she would survive.

This, he realized with absolute clarity, was going to be a problem.


	7. Letter From The Lost Days

_Sometimes, Chris Redfield dreamed. Never frequently, and never clearly, but sometimes he would find himself waking up, chest heaving, fragments of images and words still clawing their way around inside his head. He could never truly understand them, and the longer he was awake the more they faded, vanished into some dark part of his mind that he could never reach._

_A helicopter, running through a forest with gunshots and footsteps pounding in his head, a mansion with a million different rooms each full of fear, so much fear—_

— _victims were apparently—_

_But none of that mattered, not anymore. Wesker said it didn't._

_And he lived for Wesker._

"The BSAA Agents," Wesker said tersely, his shoulders tense. Chris wanted to do something, anything to erase that tension, to make Wesker happy, but instead he stood nervously in place.

Something was wrong.

"Are they dead?" he continued, turning and staring at him intensely, his gaze making him shudder.

"Yes," he answered, trying to keep his voice steady. "All of them."

Wesker didn't relax.

_Something Chris Redfield did remember was Albert Wesker. Even as the rest of his memories blurred and disappeared, Wesker remained. He could remember meeting the man for the first time like it had happened an hour ago, even though the reason they were meeting was unclear to him. He could remember the arousal building in him as they talked, as Wesker looked at him from behind the sunglasses covering his eyes._

_What were they talking about? Did it even matter?_

_He could also remember the first time they were intimate, every touch, every kiss, the pain of entry, the pleasure of knowing that he was owned, that he belonged to Wesker now and that nothing could change that._

_Where had they been, that first time? An office, with some type of emblem on the wall—_

— _Special Tactics and—_

"I can go back and check," he offered desperately. "I'll make sure they're all dead. No one will stand in your way. I'll make sure of it."

"No!" Wesker shouted, his hands flying out and grabbing Chris's arms, his fingers tightening around them until they hurt, the nails digging into his skin. "No, don't go back."

Chris's heart thudded in his chest, heat beginning to build inside him. The pain, the energy, the proximity, the heat—

"Wesker?" he rasped, leaning in against his chest. "Please tell me what's wrong?"

The grip around his arms only increased until he was sure his bones were going to snap, but then Wesker was letting go, shoving him against the wall and ripping at his clothes.

"You're mine, Chris," he hissed into his ear, venom in his voice. "You belong to me. You do understand that, don't you?"

_There were some things about Wesker, however, that were just as blurry as everything else, things that he sometimes dreamed about and always vanished in the aftermath with the rest of it. He tried to find those memories more than any of the others, but he never could._

_But it didn't matter, Wesker said._

_Helicopters and forests and mansions, a destroyed island and a woman in purple and a friendship with Dan DeChant and a long, long fall out of a window and—_

— _not human anymore, but just look at the power I've—_

_None of it had anything to do with the present._

_Now, Chris existed for Wesker and Wesker was going to make a beautiful world for him to live in, and that was the only thing that mattered._

He heard a zipper being pulled down and then Wesker was inside him and he was being fucked hard against the wall, and it hurt but it was  _good_  pain, because  _Wesker_  was causing it.

"How far would you go for me, Redfield?" he demanded, the tips of his fingers punching little holes in the wall where his hands were braced. "How much would you be willing to do?"

Chris threw his head back and gripped Wesker's shoulders tightly, barely able to concentrate on the question.

It had a simple answer, however.

"I've done . . . so much. I'd do— _anything_ —"

"Anything," Wesker breathed, darkly satisfied laughter following the word. "All for—"

"For you . . . Anything for you . . ."

He kept repeating it again and again, like a mantra, a chant, until it was over, Wesker finishing and pulling out while Chris fought for air after his own completion.

When he'd finally righted himself, fixing his clothes and standing up, he repeated his earlier question, even though Wesker didn't seem as upset as he'd been previously.

"What's wrong?"

Wesker turned away from him, cracking his knuckles and pushing his sunglasses higher on his nose, striding in the direction of the door.

Chris had concluded he wasn't going to get an answer when he paused at the threshold.

"Claire Redfield is in Kijuju," he said, and stepped out the door.


	8. Clair de Lune

Steve Burnside rubbed at his itchy, red skin and wondered if this was what turning into a zombie was like. He felt like a walking corpse, after all.

They'd been in Africa since January, and he'd managed to stay sunburned the entire time, no matter how much sunscreen he lathered on. It was embarrassing. Even Birkin— _Birkin_ , the humorless little bitch Wesker liked so much—had  _smirked_  at him when he'd been itching hard enough to draw her attention.

Africa. Fuck, he  _hated_  it. The heat, which normally lingered somewhere around a hundred degrees, had him seeing in blurry waves, his clothes always damp with sweat and his lungs struggling for each breath he took.

And yet somehow Wesker and Irving expected him to be able to collect combat data under these conditions?

If they wanted him at full capacity, they should've sent him to Alaska, or Antarctica.

Yeah, Antarctica. The South Pole. When he'd visited there ten years ago, he'd been freezing his ass off, but compared to this, it'd been heaven.

Calm, cold, desolate Antarctica, with no heat or sunburns or Sherry-Fucking-Birkin, and since Alexia Ashford and her freak brother were dead, he'd have the place all to himself. Maybe get some sled dogs for company—

" _Let me go_!"

The shriek pulled him unceremoniously out of his blessedly cool daydream and back into the heat. Scowling, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and grasped one between his fingers, lighting it.

He took a deep inhale and watched the blonde girl in front of him struggle desperately against the Majini holding her. For such a skinny thing, she certainly had strength.

But Steve knew that there was nothing she could do; it was too late for her. The fate of everyone in Kijuju had been sealed the minute that wall had gone up, and now the place was nothing more than Wesker's playground. And the people inside, they were his toys.

You had to like Wesker, even if he was a bastard. He certainly had a way of doing things . . .

"No, no, please!  _Please_! I'll do anything! I don't want to die!"

Steve shut his eyes abruptly.

" _No, please, please, I want to live! Please! Claire, anybody! Help me!"_

But that hadn't stopped Alexia. His words had been as useless as this girl's now were.

As if to prove his point, the girl's cries suddenly dissolved off into incoherent gurgling. Steve looked and saw that the Majini had finally managed get the parasite into her mouth and was messily attempting to shove it down her throat.

He succeeded after several minutes, the girl swallowing around it and immediately gagging. The Majini rolled off of her and, much to Steve's surprise, she didn't take any time to wallow around in the discomfort he knew she had to have been experiencing.

Instead, she bolted, screaming again.

Steve almost felt like shooting the Majini in the head, just for his utter incompetence. Gritting his teeth, he shoved past him in pursuit of the girl, who had stopped out on the building's balcony and was yelling at—

Steve paused at the doorway, a frown immediately coming to his face.

She was yelling at the two BSAA Agents he'd seen earlier, before Wesker had radioed and told him to take a position closer to the entrance of the supposed 'deal location'.

Earlier, he'd only seen the two from afar. He knew that they were both female, that one was black and the other white, and that one had been wearing a purple vest.

He hadn't known that one of them was Claire Redfield.

His cigarette slipping out unbidden from between his fingers, he darted back, letting the Majini rush past him.

He hadn't seen Claire in ten years. She looked a bit different, actually, but hell, once upon a time he thought he'd been in love with the girl—of course he recognized her.

And he could just  _guess_  why she was here.

Wesker was always tight lipped when it came to his little blond pet, but Steve was aware that the man was Chris Redfield.

And Claire was practically as obsessed with him as Wesker was.

Head spinning with a mixture of heat and shock and confusion, Steve darted out the back door, coming to the conclusion that his little safari was about to get very, very interesting.

.

Claire gripped the shotgun in her hands as they carefully began searching the building, slightly more disturbed than she'd been twenty minutes previous.

It might've been the atmosphere of the building, the dark, quiet emptiness, which reminded her too much of empty police stations and empty laboratories and empty airports. Or maybe it was the bodies of her comrades, of which there seemed to be at least one in every room.

Or maybe it was the residual shock of blowing off that blonde girl's head and having a huge, spiked tentacle creature rip its way out of her neck cavity.

It really could've been any of the three, and Claire was on edge.

Sheva seemed upset as well, but then again, this was her first outbreak. She was allowed to be nervous.

"Don't worry, Sheva," Claire finally said, really only to break the silence. They had come to a room with another body and several pieces of old, rotting furniture. A wooden ladder led up to a patch of broken ceiling. "I've been in three outbreaks before, and yet here I am, coming back for more."

"Three?" Sheva echoed as they began to climb the ladder.

"Yeah. Maybe four, if you count that the second one was on two different continents. Don't ask, it's complicated."

"Is this while you were working for the BSAA?"

"Uh. Well, no. Just really 'wrong place, wrong time'."

Climbing up onto the edge of the ceiling, she could almost picture Sheva's look of confusion. However, instead of elaborating, she inspected the closest door. It didn't appear to have a handle, but the hinges were rusty.

Nodding at Sheva, they both positioned themselves in front of it and kicked at roughly the same time. With a snap, the door flew in, and they heard a groan.

Claire rushed inside, quickly taking in the fact that the room was very slimy and littered with dead bodies. One person, however, was still alive.

"DeChant!" she exclaimed, kneeling in front of him and reaching out to take his pulse.

It was faint, and fading fast.

Her heart dropped in her chest. She hated just . . . watching people die, even if there was nothing she could do.

But she couldn't stop it, not this time.

"It—it's probably still here," he rasped, sparing any preamble. "It's—really big, and it—" He trailed off, coughing violently. Blood flew out of his mouth.

"Stay with me, DeChant," she said desperately, even as she heard Sheva calling for help on her radio.

"Here," he managed, holding something up with a trembling hand, a disc. "I . . . downloaded it . . ."

His head lolling back, he stared at her, a strange emotion in his eyes. "Redfield . . . Redfield, your—your—"

Another heaving cough cut him off, but this time he didn't start talking again. Blood now flowing freely down his chin, Claire felt his pulse stop.

"Damn it!" she shouted, grabbing the disc and standing up.

Sheva sighed, glancing at him and then back at her radio. "Never mind. Cancel that."

Sliding it back into her pocket, she pressed one of her shaky hands to her forehead. "What do we do now, Claire?"

She didn't really know. Irving had obviously gotten away, the team they were supposed to be providing backup for was dead, they were  _alone_ —

And something was moving in the hallway adjoining the room.

Claire snapped her head around, but all she managed to see was a flash of . . .  _red_  . . . hair before the person was gone.

Irving didn't have red hair.

Sheva ran over to the door, but the sound of an elevator starting up told Claire she was too late.

"We do we do?" she asked herself, turning the disc over and over in her hands, then pocketing it.

She pulled her shotgun back into her hands. "We follow Mister Redhead."


	9. Everything About You

On some level, he understood that Claire Redfield was his sister.

He couldn't clearly remember what the girl looked like, or what she sounded like, but somewhere deep inside his head he knew that yes, once upon a time, he'd known her. Her name conjured up blurred, mute images in his mind that flashed by too quickly to be intelligible and brought with them a strange emotion, a sick tightening in his chest.

What did that mean? What was it?

A great deal of thought had brought him to the conclusion that it was hate.

After all, he experienced the same emotion whenever he thought about  _Jill_ , and he loathed her with everything he was.

She was the reason he couldn't remember the majority of his life.

Like everything else, that night was blurry to him, only ever coming to him in small flashes of unimportant, needlessly intricate details. He remembered lightning flashing off of Wesker's sunglasses, and he remembered the slow drip-drip-drip of blood out of the ragged wound in an old man's chest, which hit the floor in time with the raindrops against the roof. He remembered the sound of glass breaking, and gunshots, and the rapid 'whoosh' of Wesker dodging.

He remembered fear.

— _fear for Wesker or—_

He remembered Wesker and Jill struggling, and the pounding, blind panic he'd felt at the sight.

And then, he was falling, falling, falling, endlessly forever, never hitting the ground, never stopping, even as everything faded into black.

Wesker said that what he'd done that night had been a remarkable show of loyalty. To throw himself to Wesker's defense without so much as an inkling of hesitation, without any heed for his own wellbeing, spoke loudly for itself.

It made Chris proud to hear him say that. It made his memories seem unimportant by comparison.

Still, if Jill ever came along again, he'd snap her neck, and his motives wouldn't be solely motivated by defending Wesker.

"They're late," said Irving, snapping Chris out of his contemplation. He stared at the laptop in his hands and scowled darkly. "We've been sitting here for twenty minutes."

"Maybe your thing got them," he muttered, pulling at one of his sleeves. The heat had never made him particularly uncomfortable until now. He felt like he was suffocating.

And the damn jeep's vents didn't even work.

"Wouldn't that just be lovely?" Irving agreed, smiling. "And by the time they realize what happened, I'll be sitting on my own private beach in the Bahamas, drinking a margarita." He leered. "And you'd complete the picture."

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that, you disgusting fuck."

Pursing his lips, Irving went to reply, only to be cut off by the back door of the car flying open. Steve Burnside slid inside, marking the first time that Chris had ever been actually happy to see him.

"Dudes," he said around the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, "our two little girls are having a totally epic battle with that tentacle thing. I heard  _explosions_."

"New data?" Chris snapped impatiently. Burnside was an immature little bastard that Wesker only kept around because he happened to be enhanced, somehow, with a virus called T-Veronica. (A name which happened to be so familiar to Chris it was almost physically painful to hear. Not that he could ever successfully place it.)

Burnside looked at him, blinked very deliberately, and narrowed his eyes. "Hey, what's with the outfit? Did you join Organization XIII in the past hour or something?"

Chris stared at him blankly for a moment, uncomprehending. " _Data_ ,Burnside!" he finally snarled, self-consciously reaching up to pull the hood of his cloak down closer to his eyes. He agreed with Wesker that Redfield should never learn his identity, so he could hardly complain about wearing the thing. He didn't have to like it, though.

Burnside shook his head. "I had to vacate before I could collect anything, because of the Agents. One of them is . . ." He trailed off, glancing at Chris.

"I already know."

"Oh . . . well. Then you know why I had to get out of there."

Irving looked back and forth between them. "What'm I missing here?"

"Nothing that concerns you," he spat, turning to face forward in his seat. "Burnside, go rendezvous with Birkin. She's on her way to the Oil Field, so just meet her there. Then stand by for the time being until we radio you with additional orders. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he sighed, rolling his eyes and sliding out of the car. "More walking. Fun."

Chris slammed on the gas pedal, leaving Burnside in a cloud of dust, and Irving suddenly perked up. "Look at that," he said, gesturing down to the computer screen. "They lived."

Chris glanced down in time to see Redfield dart across the screen, her partner close behind her, but ripped his eyes away after only catching a glimpse. Seeing her, actually _looking_  at her, made that heavy feeling return tenfold, so much that it was almost difficult to breathe.

He didn't like that feeling, so he promised himself that one way or another, Claire Redfield was going to die.

.

Still vaguely in disbelief that HQ was insisting that they continue pursing Irving in spite of everything, Claire fell heavily into the passenger seat of one of the vehicles in the garage and began to think about the year 2004, about the kidnapping of Ashley Graham and what Leon had told her afterwards, when they'd laid in bed the night after he'd been released from quarantine. That had been the only time he'd ever really opened up about what he'd seen.

And what a story he'd told.

" _They weren't zombies," he said. "They had intelligence. They could follow orders, place traps. I shot so many tripwires and bear traps I lost count. They could operate machinery, too—drive cars and use guns. One of them ran around with a chainsaw." He shuddered at that._

" _Was it some type of evolved form of the virus?" she demanded, her eyes wide and her hand gripping the sheets._

" _No," he sighed, turning away from her to stare up at the ceiling. "It was a parasite. They called it 'Las Plagas'."_

" _They?"_

" _The Los Illuminados. Saddler. They were the ones who spread it to the local villagers. And by infecting Ashley, they hoped to infect the rest of America, to conquer it from the inside out."_

_She stared at him, silently wondering if it was ever going to end. Only a year ago, Umbrella had fallen, but now she suddenly understood that their viruses weren't the only things that caused outbreaks. They weren't the only villains, and it made her want to scream and beg for it all to just stop._

" _Were all of these parasites destroyed?" she asked instead._

_Leon hesitated. "Yes."_

Leon had later given an official version of what he'd told her to the government. They'd dubbed it the 'Kennedy Report', and she'd read it several times.

Now she currently felt as though she was living it.

And she had to wonder . . .

Was the Las Plagas really gone?

Or was it . . .  _here_ , now, in Africa?

"I guess we have to," Sheva was saying, even as she glared violently at her radio. "We can't abort the mission on our own. But—but . . . there are so many of them, and we're almost out of ammo . . ."

Slowly standing and drawing her gun, Claire motioned for Sheva to cover her and started towards the garage's exit, images of chainsaws and explosives and cars with bloody bumpers taking the forefront of her thoughts.


	10. And One Day What's Lost Can Be Found

Leon found himself worrying about Claire more and more these days. To some degree, he knew his concern was unfounded—Claire was Claire, after all, and she'd survived too much to ever be considered anything but strong—but the last three years had brought about a . . . change in her.

He really hadn't known Chris Redfield that well, but he'd still been saddened by the news of his death. It had been another good person made a victim in the war against bioterrorism, another ally lost.

But he hadn't cried, not like Claire had. For a few days directly afterward, he'd thought she wouldn't ever stop.

Eventually she had, of course, but only to wander around the house like a zombie, her eyes glassy and her expression blank. Speaking to her had been pointless, as she never responded.

Things had gotten better since then, but he still worried, especially about her inexplicable decision to resign from Terrasave and join the BSAA. Willingly throwing herself into potentially violent situations just wasn't something he would've ever thought she would do.

He definitely didn't like it, because even if she wasn't concerned about her own safety, he was.

This was the reason he was currently scowling at his cell phone and violently tapping a phone number out on the keypad.

The person on the other end picked up after two rings.

"Valentine."

"Where is Claire?" he demanded, sparing any preamble. "She left me a message—said something about a mission to Africa."

"Ah, yes, that." He could hear her shift, her hair rustling against the phone. "Weapons deal, in a little place called Kijuju. She's just helping DeChant and his team arrest some scummy looking arms smuggler. It shouldn't . . . it shouldn't be anything major."

Like Chris, he didn't know Valentine all that well. Still, he had caught something in the tone of her voice, something uneasy,  _concerning_  . . .

"Why does that not make me feel better, Valentine?"

There was a long pause. "It's nothing. Just—just a rumor about this blond guy Irving's working with. It's nothing. She'll be home soon, Kennedy. Don't have a panic attack, okay?"

Snorting, he said his goodbyes and hung up, silently wondering how a rumor about a blond guy could get Jill nervous as he punched in a new number.

The phone rang six times. He began to picture Claire tackling a faceless man carrying a case with a biohazard symbol on the side, but then she picked up.

"HQ?" she asked hopefully, sounding out of breath.

"Um, no. Leon."

"Oh."

"I got your message."

"Oh. Uh, can you hold on a minute?"

His eyebrows drew together. "Sure."

She fell silent on the other end. Then, a gun discharged seven times.

"Claire!" he shouted, and he heard a muffled response of 'hold on!', followed by 'I'm trying, Sheva!'

"Claire!" he tried again. "What's going on?!"

Seconds passed, then a minute.

Finally, he got an answer.

"I'm trying to use a rifle," she bit out, "and you know how I hate those. I almost hit the damn oil drum and blew everyone up—did you get the lock off?!"

The last obviously hadn't been directed at him, but he pressed on. "You said you were in Africa—what's happening? Why do you need to use a gun?"

She hesitated, and he heard rapid footsteps.

"Leon," she finally said, "all of the Las Plagas were . . . destroyed, weren't they?"

Leon closed his eyes and clenched the phone tighter. Five years ago, when he'd written that report, he'd known that he shouldn't have excluded Ada. He shouldn't have . . . perjured himself.

But no matter how hard he'd tried, he hadn't been able to write it. So he'd lied, by omission.

Ada . . . the last surviving Plagas sample had been in her possession, and who would she have given it to?

Swallowing heavily, he felt dread pool in his stomach as he formulated an answer.

" _Oh, you'd know him if you saw him," Claire had told him once, laughing derisively as she did so. "You don't have to worry about that. He never takes his sunglasses off, and not one strand of that fucking blond hair is ever out of place. Narcissistic bastard."_

Albert Wesker was blond, wasn't he?

"Claire . . ." he began, unsure as to what he was even going to say.

But then, rather abruptly, his voice died in his throat.

He heard a chainsaw.

.

Excella Gionne could honestly say that she had never hated anyone in her life as much as she did Chris Redfield.

She and Albert were absolutely perfect for one another. She had known that since the very moment she had met him. He had power and the ambition for even more, and now, with the Uroboros, the means to achieve it. He was like a god, and she could so easily become his goddess. His dreams were hers.

And for a few blessed days at the beginning, she'd thought he'd been in reach. She'd thought she'd only had to wait for him to make his move.

But he never had, because one day he'd shown up with Redfield trailing behind him like a pathetic, kicked puppy.

At first, she'd thought he was just a bodyguard. Then she realized Albert didn't  _need_  a bodyguard.

Then she'd assumed he was some type of assistant, or subordinate, like Burnside and Birkin.

But Albert didn't fuck either of them. He did Redfield.

She'd seen them, once. They hadn't known she was there, and she'd watched in disgust and abject horror as Redfield had moaned and writhed over the desk like some type of filthy animal.

Yes, yes, that was a good comparison. Redfield was a mongrel, a weak dog that needed to be euthanized. He didn't deserve to lick Albert's boots.

Sadly, Albert himself had failed to realize this, yet.

But the time was drawing near, she knew it was, and it was all thanks to one of the little BSAA Agents.

"You seem very concerned," she said, gently piercing his arm with the needle. He didn't flinch, and his gaze never wavered from the television screen in front of them. On it, the two agents were fleeing wildly from a Majini wielding a chainsaw, shooting at it in what appeared to be a futile attempt to stop it from advancing.

"Does young Miss Redfield pose that much of a threat?"

"No," he hissed, ripping his arm away from her as soon as the entire contents of the syringe had been drained. "She is just a minor nuisance."

Excella slowly put the syringe back into the case and stood. "But perhaps she presents more of a problem for your lovely . . . agent, Christopher? What does he think of his sister's impending death?"

"That it is years too late," he responded, but Excella smiled nonetheless.

Oh yes, things would be changing very, very soon.

.

"Dodge now!" Claire shrieked, flinging herself to the side even as she did so. Around her, the air seemed to be alive with the smell of death and burning flesh and metal and rubber. Crows swooped overhead, their cries only broken by the roaring of the motorcycles that seemed to be coming from everywhere.

She hit the ground, but then something was tight, agonizingly tight around her ankle and she was being dragged, her bare arms scraping against the dirt which flew into her face, blinding her.

"Help me!" she screamed, and a gunshot rang out. The chain snapped, flying back to strike her calf, and then she was rolling instead of being pulled. Somehow she managed to stagger to her feet, pain shooting up her leg.

Through her watering eyes, she saw that there were a lot of them, four or five at the least, and two of them were—

Her body moved before her mind and she found herself hitting the ground again, the dirt irritating the open cuts on her elbows. Crawling forward, she found her footing and stood again, grabbing Sheva and pulling her to her side.

She whipped her head to the side at the sound of a motor growing closer and barely had time to process that she would not be able to dodge when the rider abruptly fell off, his head exploding.

"What—" Sheva began, but then another shot rang out, and another and another. The Majini fell off of their bikes one by one until there were none left, ending their attack as abruptly as it had begun.

Very slowly, the dust began to settle. Claire looked from the sniper on the roof to the BSAA team standing several feet away and experienced a letdown of adrenaline that left her vaguely shaky.

She glanced down at the burnt out shell of one of the bikes, the gas tank now only a ragged hole in the side, and thought that when she got back to America, she might cancel her subscription of Motorcycle Enthusiast Magazine.

.

"Claire Redfield, meet Josh Stone, the Captain of the Delta Team. Josh, Claire."

"Hi," said Claire, offering her hand. He shook it vigorously.

"I've heard a lot about you, Miss Redfield," he said. "It's definitely an honor."

She blushed. "You flatter me."

"Why am I the only one who doesn't seem to know anything about you, Claire?" Sheva demanded.

Josh's gaze slid over to her. "Sheva. How are you holding up? Your first outbreak situation—mine, too, though, so I guess we're in the same boat."

She smiled. "I guess I'm doing as well as can be expected."

Claire glanced between them. "You know each other?"

"Josh trained me," said Sheva, nodding. "He taught me everything I know."

"You're obviously a very good teacher, Captain Stone," she said, grinning. "Sheva is a wonderful partner. It's so great to have someone competent for a change, you don't even know."

"Your other partners have been incompetent, then?"

She shrugged. "One guy managed to accidently spray poisonous gas into our only escape route because he was daydreaming at the controls of a crane."

Sheva blinked and Josh laughed, shaking his head. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small cartridge. "Now Sheva, Claire, HQ still insists you continue the search for Irving. They now not only want to arrest him for arms trafficking, but also interrogate him about the outbreak, which makes him an even higher priority than he was previously. And the information we recovered from the hard drive makes us think that he has fled somewhere into the mining area near here." He handed it to Claire. "There's more info inside, if you want to look."

She nodded and pulled out her PDA, sliding the cartridge into the end.

"The Delta Team has business to take care of here, but we'll rendezvous with you as soon as possible. Keep your radios handy."

"Thanks, Josh," said Sheva.

He nodded and stepped out the door, leaving Claire to scroll through the information displayed on the small screen. It was all fairly pointless, really nothing she didn't know (or, at least suspect) already, though mention of some type of underground facility caught her attention. Unfortunately, there was just a blurb about it and she moved on, clicking on an image file.

Slowly, it loaded onto the screen, and she felt the world crash down around her.

 


	11. Isolate and Save You From Yourself

Chris Redfield was dead.

Dead.

He fell out of a window, and he died.

Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, and no matter how much she wished it wasn't true, no matter how much she'd begged and pleaded with an unmerciful god to make it all just be some twisted, horrible nightmare, there was no changing it—her. Brother. Was. Dead.

She'd thought that she'd known grief before, when her parents had died, when Steve had died, choking on the first declaration of love that was doomed to be the last, but this was so different. She was hollow, like a shell, a skin just going through the motions of a pointless, grey life.

Dead.

She would never see him again, not even to say goodbye to a corpse.

But then, she had clicked on an image file and as it had slowly loaded onto the screen, he had suddenly been there again.

He was different looking, pale and blonde, with a dazed little smile on his face that was so unlike Chris, but she was his  _sister_. She  _knew_  that it was him.

So suddenly Chris might be alive, and she had no idea what to think.

.

Sheva stared at the crushed remains of the jeep they had been sitting in five seconds earlier, and then turned her gaze to the dead body of that  _thing_. It was a nauseating sight, a complete freak of nature, an abomination worse than any Majini could ever be.

But it also looked human. It had four limbs, and a face.

Thinking about how it might've been made scared her, but not as much as the thought of what it might've done to Josh. He was like a brother to her, and she had no idea what she would do if she ever lost him.

"I'm continuing ahead, Sheva," said Claire, her voice piercing in the still night air. "But you can back out, if you want to. I realize how bad the situation is."

Sheva snapped her head around to look at her incredulously. "Claire, look around you!" She spread her arms, trying to encompass the entirety of the destroyed village—the damaged buildings, the corpses, the fires. "This is impossible! I want to catch Irving, too, but it's not something worth dying over!"

Claire continued to reload all of her weapons methodically, not even looking up at her. "I'm not in this for Irving. I don't care about him anymore." She roughly pumped her shotgun and slung it over her back, moving on to the rifle. "It's personal now. I have to know . . ."

"Know  _what_?"

"If he's—if he's still alive. If that picture was really . . .  _him_."

Sheva tilted her head in curiosity. "Who is 'he', Claire? What picture?"

Her hands slowed in their movement, and she finally met her eyes. Claire looked upset, desperate, even, and when she spoke, her voice was thick.

"The information Josh gave us had a photo inside,  _and_ —" Her voice wavered dangerously. "It was of my brother. But until then, I had been under the impression he was dead."

"Oh, Claire," she breathed, reaching out and resting her hands on her arms.

Claire swallowed heavily, forcing a smile. "We were always close, Chris and me. I always tried to get him out of trouble only to inevitably end up needing rescuing myself . . ." She laughed. ". . . and he was always there to help me. But I thought, after that night, that he was gone forever . . . until today. If he's alive, Sheva, I'm going to find him. I  _have_  to."

She pulled away, grabbing the rifle by the barrel and striding purposefully in the direction of the nearest motorboat.

Sheva watched her go. Part of her, a large part, wanted nothing more than to turn around and leave Kijuju, to go home and soak in a bathtub and forget all about the horrors she'd seen.

But then she thought about Josh, and she imagined what it would be like if it was them in this situation.

"Claire," she said quietly, "wait. I'm coming with you."

.

"So . . ." She was hesitant to ask the question, but forced herself to do so. "What happened to your brother, Claire?"

Claire glanced away, out at the passing marsh. It was getting light, which meant they'd been traveling for hours. They hadn't spoken even once.

"He . . . was involved in a mission during which BSAA agents attempted to arrest a man named Albert Wesker. But Wesker is—he's not . . . normal, and the whole thing went badly. To save the life of his partner, he wound up throwing himself at him and—they fell. It was . . . a very long drop."

"I'm so sorry, Claire," she murmured, looking down at her lap.

"Don't be," she said stiffly. "It's nobody's fault except Wesker's."

"And . . . you want him to pay for it, don't you?"

Claire hesitated. "Yes. Very much so. But I don't even know where he is."

They fell into an awkward silence, the only noise being the boat's motor and the pleasant echoes of animal calls. Claire braced herself and tightened her hand around the directional shift as the boat slid up and over a lowered fence, landing on the other side with a muffled thump that sent water splashing up onto them.

"My parents," Sheva began abruptly. "They died in an outbreak caused by Umbrella. For years I didn't know but then I found out that . . . Africa was nothing more than their testing ground. They died just so wealthy men in suits could make more money by selling weapons to terrorists. So, I do understand, Claire."

They didn't talk again.


	12. I'll Believe All Your Lies

_It was a strange smell, death._

_Pungent, repulsive, purely headache inducing, with an underlying scent of rot and the metallic twang of blood, all of which mixed together to form something overwhelming._

_It was all around him, on every side, drifting up from the corpses sprawled along the ground._

_He had never seen so many dead bodies. They were everywhere, all tangled around each other, their decaying skin almost melting in the burning African heat. Gore and blood and pus leaked from each of them, soaking into the dirt they laid on._

_This was the result of preliminary bioweapons testing. Dead men, dead women, dead children, dead animals, death, death, death. There was a veritable sea of bodies, and he stood in the middle, his feet tucked in between several unmoving, mangled limbs._

_In its rawest form, Wesker's new virus had a ninety nine percent mortality rate. It caused massive internal mutation that the majority of human bodies just couldn't handle, and even the few who managed to survive it went mad and ended up killing each other. The little village in central Africa Tricell had allotted to be the first testing ground had destroyed itself in less than a day, and now the only survivor Chris could see was an uninfected teenage girl rocking back and forth in the shade of a hut. She muttered under her breath in her native tongue, staring glassily at the dead body of a young boy._

_His radio beeped suddenly. The sound was very, very loud in the utter stillness, so he answered quickly._

_Wesker's image filtered onto the view screen, making some of Chris's nausea abate._

" _Results," he demanded shortly._

" _It was fatal to almost everyone. The only subjects that could accept it seemed to be healthy men between the ages of twenty and forty, but it caused extremely violent impulses in them. They slaughtered each other."_

_Wesker was silent for a moment, his face expressionless as he took in the information._

" _Is anyone still alive?" he finally asked, idly adjusting his sunglasses._

_Chris's gaze wandered over to the girl. "Only one . . . she avoided infection altogether, somehow . . ."_

" _That is to be expected of a small percentage. Kill her and make your way to the extraction point. Birkin will meet you there."_

_The screen went black. Chris stared at it for a long moment, and then back at the girl._

_Kill her._

_She was so young, maybe sixteen at the most._

_Kill her._

_She was young and pretty and so, so damaged, haunted, ruined by what she'd seen. She was so like . . ._

— _claireclaireclaireclaireclaire—_

— _killherkillherkillherkillher—_

" _Anything for you, Wesker," he breathed, and shot her in the head._

.

It would be so easy to kill her.

It would be so pathetically  _simple_ , almost a nonevent. All he would have to do would be pull out his rifle and look through the scope, aim the crosshairs right in the center of her pretty little head and pull the trigger. The gun would jerk and a bullet would fly out and rip through her skull, and she would die, her brain splattering out onto the two other BSAA Agents in the motorboat with her.

They wouldn't even know what had happened for several long seconds, sitting there with wide eyes as they slowly came to the realization that that was blood on their faces, and by then he'd be gone, off to take his rightful place by Wesker's side as the glorious New World was ushered into existence.

But for some reason, as the red laser sight hovered over the back of her scalp, blazing the way for the bullet, Chris did not pull the trigger.

.

Sherry watched through her binoculars as Irving writhed in his death throes, choking on his own blood as he tried to draw air into his bullet-ridden chest, but when Burnside asked to look, she gladly handed them over.

She didn't like to think about monsters that had once been human. She preferred BOWs like Hunters or Chimeras, things that had never had thoughts or emotions or dreams, things that had never been a person with a name, things that had never been fathers.

In a span of a day, her father had gone from a parent she'd hardly known to something that still haunted her nightmares, a twisted  _thing_  that had slowly shed more and more of its identity until it had been nothing more than a mass of flesh created from William Birkin's cells.

She'd helped kill that thing. Did that mean she'd murdered her father?

Claire would've told her no. Claire would've held her, made her feel happy and safe, because that was just what Claire did.

But how would Claire view her now? As an enemy? As a . . . monster, like her father had been?

Would she hate her, look at her with disgust?

Sherry told herself that she would, just because it made things easier.

.

"Chris. Redfield," Claire gritted out. Some part of her felt like she needed to do something threatening to get her point more thoroughly across, shove a gun in Irving's face or kick him in the side, but considering that the man was already dying, the more rational part of her mind thought that would be pointless.

"Redfield," Irving repeated, coughing wetly.

She ripped the PDA out of her pocket, pulling up the image. " _This_  man. My brother.  _Where is he_? Where is this facility? The Uroboros, what is it? What does it have to do with what's going on here?"

Irving strained his bloodshot eyes up to look at her more closely, abruptly bursting into laughter. "R-Redfield—sister—a big bad BSAA agent—" He kept giggling even as blood leaked out of his mouth.

"What's so funny?" she demanded, almost shouting. Irving wasn't going anywhere but somehow she still felt he was escaping, slipping through her grasp into death and taking Chris with him.

Irving shook his head loosely. "You're just about as perceptive as your brother, ain't ya? The balance of the world is changing and you're completely oblivious to it . . ."

"Irving!" she screamed, digging her nails into the leather of her gloves. Behind her, Sheva put a hand on her arm, making a quiet soothing noise.

"Fine . . ." he said, laboriously spitting out another gush of blood. "Fine . . . all the answers to your wonderfully intelligent questions . . . are up ahead, through the caves . . . but even if you find them, you're still screwed . . ."

He died laughing.

.

Chris Redfield loathed Excella Gionne with every fiber of his being. Truly, he had never hated anyone so intensely, or so thoroughly.

It was everything about her: the way she dressed (whorishly) and the way she walked (with an overconfident, purely sickening strut) and the way she talked (always with a little arrogant lilt to her voice) and just, in general, her personality.

He could've, he supposed, overlooked all of those things, just so long as she'd kept herself away from things that didn't belong to her.

But no. She wanted Wesker, and she was definitely pursuing him. She was being subtle about it, but he noticed the way she smiled at him, looked at him. She was always trying to touch his arm or his shoulder, lathering on the charm a thousand fold whenever he was present.

Though honestly, she'd never done anything quite like  _this_.

"You'll be needing a partner, right?" she purred, sliding her hands over his chest. Chris wanted to rip them off.

No one . . .  **no one**  . . . touched Wesker except for  _ **him**_ **.**

"Someone . . . suitable . . . to join you in your new world?" she continued, a vapid little smile on her face.

Chris wanted to break her teeth.

"I believe I've proved myself . . . worthy, haven't I?"

And then—and  _then_ —Wesker grasped her chin. Wesker.  _Touched_. Her.

Wesker touched her, when he was only supposed to touch  _him_.

Chris felt everything screech to a halt, his heart stop in his chest and his air freeze in his lungs as visions of a perfect future shattered, as he saw his decade long relationship fall apart and his  _life_  end along with it—

But then Wesker pushed Excella away roughly and in an instant Chris could breathe again, his irrational rush of panic fading away.

He  _knew_  Wesker would never be unfaithful. It was just Excella who was having a difficult time understanding that.

But perhaps . . . all she needed was a short, informative lesson.

So as his heart rate returned to normal and Excella strutted past him out of the room, Chris followed her, a devious smile on his face.


	13. Misery Business

One moment, Excella had been walking, replaying what had happened again and again in her head.

She was having some difficulty coming to terms with it.

Albert hadn't responded to her advances. He hadn't actually said 'no' but he'd still gotten it across clearly enough.

She had been . . .  _rejected_.

No man had  _ever_  rejected her before. How could they, when she was the perfect woman? Beautiful, intelligent, witty, charming, fun,  _devoted_ —

It was simply inconceivable.

But yet . . . it had just happened.

So one moment, Excella was walking, woefully unaware of her surroundings as she wallowed in her disbelief, and in the next instant, pain exploded in her leg and she was falling, her hands automatically flailing out to brace herself against the floor. When they connected, it was jarring, and her elbows gave out, sending the rest of her collapsing down.

"It is . . .  _very_  impolite to try to seduce a man who's already taken,  _Excella_  . . ."

Redfield. His voice was low, a hiss, and the way he said her name, with a disgusted, purely loathing lilt, made her heart start to beat faster in the beginnings of panic.

"And if you didn't know . . . Wesker  _is_  taken."

Excella gritted her teeth, letting her sudden anger overwhelm the fear. "Albert can do better than a filthy, ugly, mindless freak like you. He deserves a beautiful woman by his side—"

Redfield stepped into her field of vision and slowly crossed his arms over his chest, blinking his weird, silvery eyes down at her curiously. "A 'beautiful' woman? Then where do  _you_ factor into this?"

Then he pulled his foot back and kicked her in the side. She screamed, partially out of the new burst of pain radiating out from the impact point, but also from the sheer horror of actually  _hearing_  something inside her break with a sick, wet snap.

She skidded across the floor from the force, only stopping once she hit the wall.

"I don't think," Redfield continued, stalking across the room and grabbing her hair, "that you understand that Wesker has no interest in you personally. Tricell is providing funding and you happen to be Tricell's representative. He puts up with you for that reason, and that  _alone_."

He pulled her up, the long black strands going taught around his hand as they were forced to support her full weight.

Excella felt as though her scalp was being ripped apart, and the sensation only doubled when Redfield braced his foot against the small of her back and pushed, flinging her away into the nearest piece of furniture, a glass table that shattered when she landed on it.

The broken shards cut into her exposed arms and neck, and as she laid there, trying and failing to get her limbs to respond, she realized that her head was dripping something . . . scarlet.

Moaning, she laboriously reached upward, running her fingers along the top of her head. They came back warm and wet, just as Redfield stepped back in front of her, a large chunk of her hair still clutched in his hands.

"My—my—"

Redfield smirked, eyeing the clump of bloody black strands. "Wesker and I . . . we've been together for a long time, you know? He says twelve years . . . I'd rather die than be unfaithful to him, and I know he feels the same way . . . he'd never fuck a whore like you . . ."

The expression on his face suddenly changed, darkening dangerously. He let her hair slip out of his fingers and leaned down, moving so that their faces were almost touching.

"But it still really, really pisses me off that you tried to take him away from me."

He grabbed the back of her head and slammed her face down onto the floor. Once, twice, three times, four times, even as her nose snapped and her vision went blurry and she started shrieking at the top of her lungs.

"Filthy  _slut_!" Redfield was screaming, moving with his free hand to pull her arm tight around her back.

" _Stop!_ " she begged, writhing and struggling as hard as she could. It had no effect. "Stop! You're not allowed to hurt me!  _Stop_!"

Redfield abruptly let go of her head, leaving it to fall limply against the floor.

Excella choked on her own blood, her breath caught in her throat as she listened carefully for what Redfield was doing. She could hear him breathing, but nothing else; had he realized Albert would be angry with him for hurting her and decided to stop?

Her question was promptly answered when he took her hand, grabbed her pointer finger, and broke it.

She opened her mouth and screeched, resuming her pointless struggle even as Redfield moved on to the next finger, and the next and the next.

"Oh, but I can hurt you, Excella!" he said, laughing insanely. "I can hurt you as much as I want! There's no one here to stop me!"

"A—Alb—" she tried to gurgle.

"Wesker doesn't  _care_! He doesn't give a  _fuck_  about you! But yet you persist! I've had to deal with you for the better part of a year, and I believe I've been patient, oh yes, so patient. But what you just did ten minutes ago . . ."

 _Ten minutes_ , she thought wildly.  _Had it only been ten minutes? Not ten hours since this had started?_

". . . was too much!  _No one touches Wesker except for me_! No one! He. Is. Mine!"

Her last intact finger, her left ring finger, was snapped to emphasize the last. Blood trickled out of her mouth and down her chin as she tried to summon up another scream, only for no noise to come out.

She could only lay there as Redfield grabbed her wrists and flipped her over onto her back like she was nothing more than a ragdoll.

Then, he let go and simply stood there, his face blank and blood splattered.

"But I suppose," he finally said, "that if you just can't understand that the object of your affections is in a loving, committed relationship with a long term partner . . . that if you just can't stop trying to lead him away from me . . ."

He slowly reached up, pulling his knife out of his shoulder holster. ". . . I can resolve the problem permanently."

She managed a low, terrified keening noise. "You—you  _can't_ kill me . . ."

A smile split Redfield's face. "Oh no, Excella-dear. I wouldn't kill you. Just . . ." He ran his fingers over the tip of the knife, his eyes flicking down to her crotch. ". . . make it so that you physically  _can't_  fuck Wesker, or anyone, for awhile."

Warmth trickled down the insides of her thighs, sliding down onto the floor. Soon, the urine accumulated into a small puddle, and Redfield was smirking once again, sliding his knife back into the hostler.

"I'm glad we're clear," he said, turning on his heels and walking back through the destroyed room in the direction they had come, only to pause suddenly at the doorway.

"And  _stop_  calling him 'Albert', for fuck's sake."

Then he was gone.

.

"What did you do to Excella?" asked Wesker amusedly, leaning back in his chair as Chris entered the room.

He walked around to the front, an innocent expression on his face. "Nothing, Wesker. What would make you think that?"

"I heard some interesting . . . noises. The woman certainly has volume, if nothing else. What did you do?"

The façade dropped off of Chris's face in an instant, replaced by a deranged glint in his eyes. "She  _touched_  you," he spat, reaching out and resting his hands on Wesker's chest. "She put her filthy hands on you." Chris glared at the spot his own hand now covered, renewed anger simmering inside him. "And you didn't protest right away . . ."

Wesker shook his head, threading his arms behind Chris's back and pulling him down to straddle him, pushing their lips together. The kiss was short but intense, as they usually were, with teeth clanking together and tongues twisting around each other with a practiced ease. Chris was stiff at first, his muscles tight, but eventually the tension receded and he wrapped his arms around Wesker's neck, as the other's hands moved down to cup his ass.

"You're quite funny, Chris," Wesker murmured when they broke away. "Worrying over something so utterly insignificant, so  _imagined_ , when we have much larger problems."

Chris swallowed thickly. "So you're not . . . interested in Excella?"

Wesker rolled his eyes. "The woman is irritating, overbearing, and generally whorish. I don't even  _like_  her as a person."

Finally, he managed to smile, and it was genuine. He pressed his face into the crook of Wesker's neck, nuzzling and licking down to the collar of his shirt, where he continued his trek downwards with small, open mouthed kisses, pausing only to gently nip and mouth his nipples through the thin material.

Wesker laid one of his hands on Chris's head, encouraging him as he slid off his lap to kneel on the floor, reaching for his zipper.

"You have to try to understand," Chris said abruptly, even as he reached in and wrapped his hand around Wesker's semi-erect cock and began stroking it to full hardness.

"What would you do if you thought, if I was, with someone else?"

Wesker didn't answer immediately and Chris didn't wait for a response, instead lowering his mouth to kiss the tip, sliding his tongue along the leaking slit.

Wesker pressed him forward, sliding fully into his mouth, and let his head fall back against the chair as he began thrusting into the slick, wet heat.

"I'd kill you, Christopher," he whispered to himself. "I'd kill you."


	14. In My Field of Paper Flowers

Evil was a flower.

Claire found the idea almost laughable, but there it was, spelled out in black and white in the worn pages of the journal she held.

"' _Mister Spencer,"_ she began aloud, pacing around top of the garden, _"'once spoke of a flower called the Stairway to the Sun. Supposedly this flower would give the person who consumed it incredible abilities. Everyone thought that it was nothing more than a rumor or legend that Mister Spencer was telling us, but later research would prove us wrong.'"_

She paused, and with shaky fingers, turned the page. "' _The first person to recognize the validity of that story was my teacher, Doctor James Marcus. He hypothesized that a virus, hereto unknown, might exist that could_  . . . '" She hesitated. "'. . .  _alter DNA_.'"

Sheva swallowed convulsively, her eyes falling on the bed of flowers. They were ugly things, with thin red petals that looked fragile, like they were rotting away from the inside out, one touch enough make them wither.

But Claire didn't dare.

Somberly, she continued:

"' _The virus discovered in that flower was labeled 'Progenitor'.'"_

Laughable. Funny. Hilarious.

Flowers. A naturally beautiful thing, a universal symbol of love, of celebration and life—that was the source. Raccoon City and Rockfort Island and Harvardville and so many other incidents of bioterrorism, the millions of lives that had ended torturously, prematurely, unjustly . . .

It was all because of this flower, and monsters like Spencer and Marcus who had twisted it into a weapon.

A bitter taste rising in her mouth, Claire shut the book and threw it on top of the flowers, slowly backing down the stone steps in the direction of their destination.

She reached into her pocket, her hand closing over something hard and smooth. She pulled it out, staring at it in the palm of her hand.

The lighter was ancient, over ten years old. Over time, the gold finish had turned a coppery green, but in the blinding light beating down onto the flowers, she could clearly make out the initials engraved across it.

_C.R._

She carried it for good luck, and she didn't want to part with it. But Chris would want her to do this.

"Stand back, Sheva," she said, flicking it open. The flame burned brightly across the metal at the top, perfectly self contained and only destructive enough to burn the tip of a cigarette.

She threw it.

It spun, the flame flickering dangerously as it arced through the air and connected with the closest flower, which caught fire instantly. Soon it spread, becoming hot and fast and intense, an inferno of withering, rotting evil.

But god, how Claire wished someone had done that decades ago, long before Spencer had ever safaried in Kijuju.

.

Over time, Chris had become quite proficient at watching. He could vaguely remember a time when that hadn't been the case, when he'd been full of anxious energy, always squirming with the need to move and just do something, anything, but that had been something Wesker hadn't liked about him.

"It irritates," he'd said, once.

Therefore, it was no longer a part of him.

He was very, very patient, now, content to sit and watch from the shadows as the BSAA Agents stumbled towards the answers they searched for.

Claire was so very pathetic. She was blind, a narrow minded, ignorant fool too preoccupied with her obsession with her brother to really  _see_  what was happening around her.

Pathetic, because all she would have to do to find him was look, very closely. Look in the shadows behind her, around her, look through the dark windows she passed by, at the cameras watching her every step.

She could've had all the answers, but she chose to stay off in her own little dark world, drawing it out taut until everything inevitably snapped under the pressure.

Chris really didn't know what to make of her feelings for him. He didn't understand what they were, what they meant.

He didn't understand why she was searching for him when he hated her so much.

Maybe that was why he watched without acting, why he couldn't just kill her. He had to have his own answers first.

But what, exactly, were the questions?

"Damn it," said Claire, hesitating by one of the researchers' abandoned desks. In her hand, she held what appeared to be a small, military radio, which made a loose, metallic clanking noise when she tilted it to the side.

Alomar made a face. "I don't think it's supposed to do that."

"No . . ." Tilting it further, a piece dropped off. Claire winced. "It must've been the crab-things in the pyramid. So much for waiting for our reception to come back. I guess we really are on our own, now . . ."

"You're just starting to feel that way?" she demanded, one of her eyebrows arching. "I've felt cut off since we entered the caves. At least now we're back in a modern building."

"Yes," she said grimly, glancing around. Her eyes lingered on several streaks of blood running diagonally across the far wall. "This probably means we're close to something."

"Is it the same place from the photograph?"

". . . Maybe. Probably. I can't be certain, but how many places like this can there be in one stretch of jungle?"

"So . . ." Alomar broke into a smile. "This means we're close!"

"Yes . . ."

Her expression faded. "But you don't seem very happy about it. I thought—"

"Oh, I'm happy! I'm—I'm ecstatic! But I'm also . . . nervous. I—I have no idea what I'm going to find, Sheva. And . . . and . . . I've been thinking about it, ever since I saw the picture. I've given more thought to it than I ever have before . . . and I have to wonder . . . if Chris didn't die . . . then how did he live? How did he survive that night? If he's here . . . how did he get here? What happened?"

"Are you . . . afraid of the answers, Claire? Are you scared of what you might find?"

She was silent for a long time, her teeth gnawing at her bottom lip. "I don't know," she finally said. "I don't know. I just want this to be over, and I want Chris to be alright. And I would feel a lot better if we had an open line for Josh, or HQ, to contact us through. But . . ." She twirled the radio around her fingers. "It looks like it's just you and me. Leon's going to have to wait until I get back . . ."

"Leon?"

"My husband. Uh, soon to be ex, husband."

"Oh, I'm, uh, sorry, Claire."

"Don't be. He just . . . didn't understand."

Chris didn't linger for more. He couldn't, because he suddenly found himself confused, almost to the point of disorientation.

He'd thought something strange. Something had sprung up in his head completely unbidden, materializing alongside his usual thoughts like it belonged there, but yet—it didn't belong there. It was foreign, unlike him, not something belonging to the category of 'things he experienced emotion over'.

But yet, somehow, when Claire had mentioned Leon and that they were divorcing, he had thought, with a flare of burning, righteous, genuine anger:

"How  _dare_  that bastard hurt my little sister."

.

"It would be hard for anyone to deal with," said Claire, pocketing the destroyed remains of her radio and taking the opportunity to reload her gun. "I know I changed a lot. But you have to give him credit—he tried, for three years. It's not his fault."

Sheva diverted her eyes to the ground awkwardly, and they stayed there for the next several minutes as they wove their way through the linear halls of the building.

Everything was very . . . quiet, save for the noises from the test animals in the kennel they passed through. There were no Majini, no dogs, nor even any of the little crab creatures from the caves and ruins.

But there was blood. Lots and lots of blood, all over the walls and the floor and the ceiling, along with deep scratches and the occasional mangled corpse.

Something was in the building with them, but it just wasn't showing itself.

"Claire?"

Sheva's voice was low, a whisper—she seemed to understand they weren't alone, either.

"Yes?"

"What do you do when you find your brother? After, I mean? What do you do?"

Claire stilled, the sheer magnitude of the question freezing her in place.

In all the hours, the days, they'd spent in Africa, she hadn't thought about that even one time.

If she found Chris, what did she do next? What happened then?

It wouldn't be like it had been ten years ago, in Antarctica. There wouldn't be just a cursory 'hello, I've been so worried'. She had honestly spent three years thinking he was dead. She'd mourned for him, attended his funeral. How do you say 'hello' to that? Where do you begin? How do you start over, start rebuilding your life?

She had no idea.

"I . . . I don't . . ." she began, unsure as to where the sentence was headed.

But, perhaps thankfully, she didn't have to complete it.

Five feet in front of them, a window exploded out from the inside, sending shards of glass flying to the floor.

Something crawled out of the gaping hole.

It was large and pink in color, with an exposed brain and no eyes, huge claws and an incredibly long tongue.

And even though she hadn't seen one in ten years, Claire knew what it was.

A Licker.

.

"They must reproduce like rabbits!"

"Who cares about that? Just keep running!"

It was true, though—she had never seen such a high concentration of the things in one place before. The horde they were now running from was maybe double the number she'd come across during her entire ordeal in Raccoon City, and in her peripheral vision, she could see even more of them crawling along the wall sized glass windows lining the hall.

What the  _hell_ had they been giving the things?

Following Sheva around the nearest corner, she winced as a razor sharp tongue lashed out and caught the edge of the wall, ripping into the cement like it was butter. Blindly, she shot in the general direction it had come from and was rewarded with a piercing, pained shriek and the frantic clicking of claws as it tried to keep up the chase.

"Elevator!" Sheva shouted, practically flying to the other side of the room and slamming her hand against the button. Above it, a light flashed green and the doors began to open at a torturously slow pace.

"Open, goddamn it!" Sheva shouted, even as Claire glanced over her shoulder and regretted it immediately.

The number had tripled. They were literally everywhere, covering every surface like a swarm of insects, claws tapping and tongues waving.

Pulling a grenade off her vest, she ripped out the pin and heaved it, turning sideways and following Sheva through the elevator's cracked doors as it went off, sending blood and bits of gore flying in every direction.

They immediately began slamming the 'close' button, but it was too slow. A Licker that had originally been at the back of the pack jumped, hurling itself through the air and landing on the doors, the tips of its claws penetrating through the metal. It wedged its head inside, its tongue whipping out and curling around Sheva's leg.

Claire responded on pure instinct, ripping her knife out of its holster and slicing though the tongue.

A guttural, agonized noise escaping it, the Licker immediately fell away, and the doors were finally allowed to close.

The elevator jerked and began to descend.

"Are you okay?" she asked, bending down and pulling her back to her feet.

She nodded, gingerly brushing off her thigh. "Yeah, it didn't break the skin."

"Good. God, I hate Lickers . . ."

"I've read about him," she said, nodding. "But you've had field experience with them?"

"I wouldn't call it . . . 'field experience'. I wasn't actually working for the BSAA back then. But yeah, I've seen them before. They were a little bit different, though."

The elevator jerked again, and the doors opened. They stepped out into a bright, stainless steel hallway that led around a corner into . . .

Claire gaped openly, her eyes going wide in a mix of awe and horror.

Incubators. It had taken her a second to understand that those were what she was seeing, but now that she did, she could barely comprehend how many there were.

Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. A million?

They lined the walls on every side of the massive, round room, going up and down in endless rows, one after another. Each was identical, a white grey coffin for the test subject trapped inside.

As she watched, one of the incubators jolted and was lifted away from its stop by a mechanism, extending out into the gap between the walls and the platform they stood on. The front snapped open, revealing a hideous, decaying human body that was promptly discarded like trash.

She felt ill.

"My God," Sheva muttered, her own face a mirror of her partner's. "They must've been kidnapping people from all over the world for years. How did they get away with this?"

This, Claire decided even as she walked over to the computer in the middle of the platform and began hitting buttons, was one of those things she hadn't wanted to find. Chris unconscious in an incubator, being treated like a thing rather than a person?

Yeah, definitely not what she'd been hoping for.

But even then, she could still feel her heart begin to pound in her chest with rising anticipation, feel butterflies take up residence in her stomach. Had she done it? Had she finally found him?

Holding her breath, she entered the name 'Redfield, Christopher' and hit enter.

And there was a match, his picture springing up onto the screen along with a blurb of information.

_As of 10/1/06, subject appears to be fully recovered from physical trauma. All vital signs, including heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, and temperature, are within normal values. However, perhaps as a result of one or more of the tests, an unexplained pigmentation abnormality has been observed, which seems to be limited to the membranes of the eyes, hair follicles, and the epidermis. Attending researcher: A.W._

Even as the platform began to descend, Claire's eyes scanned and rescanned the paragraph, almost like it could produce more answers if she looked at it harder.

Of course, it couldn't, and so eventually she backed away, more questions than answers floating around her mind. She hoped Chris would be able to answer a few of them.

But then the platform ground to a screeching halt and she realized she had more pressing matters to attend to.

"What is that?" Sheva demanded, staring at the gigantic, twisted crab creature that was descending on them, taking up a place along the side of the platform.

Claire shrugged, pulling her shotgun off her back and pumping it. "What does it even matter anymore?"

Sheva pulled out her submachine gun, nodding in agreement. "You have a point . . ."

All in all, the monster was dispatched rather quickly. It certainly wasn't the most difficult battle Claire had ever fought—the thing had glaring weak points and, after awhile, became predictable in its attacks, apparently too unintelligent to adapt. This made her think it was probably some type of prototype, a cast off early experiment of a Tricell researcher that someone had simply failed to dispose of properly, which of course meant it fell to her to take care of.

She could barely focus during the fight, at times coming dangerously close to being swiped with a claw or sent flying by a jolt of the platform. She felt like she was running in place, so close to her ultimate goal but unable to reach it because of this  _thing_.

She wished it would just disappear and let her continue, and after awhile, it did. A well-placed shotgun blast into its weakened vulnerable area loosened its grip on the platform and sent it careening down into the depths below, hitting the bottom with a thundering boom.

The platform's power returned, the room's lights flicking back on, and it continued its descent like nothing had happened. Eventually, it stopped, and an incubator began moving forward on its metal mechanism.

Claire held her breath, and Sheva's hand crept into hers.

It opened with a loud, hydraulic hiss, releasing a flood of liquid—

And there was nothing inside.

"Very, very impressive, Agent Redfield."

The voice was high and feminine and accompanied by slow, mocking applause. Claire spun around, her gun at the ready, but the source wasn't physically in the room with her. She was on the computer screen, in a box that had popped up over Chris's picture.

Blonde and baby faced, the woman smiled at her languidly.

"Who are you?" Claire spat.

She waved a dismissive hand. "That doesn't matter. Let's just say, I know that you shouldn't be here. The BSAA gave orders to retreat, didn't they? Irving is dead—obviously no weapons deals are going to be happening any time soon. Doesn't that mean your mission is a success?"

"The objective of our mission is classified information—how do you know anything about it? Do you work for Tricell?"

"I work for a private third party, not that it concerns you. Nothing here does."

"Chris concerns me! Where is he?! Why isn't he in this thing?"

"So, so many questions that I'm afraid I just don't have the answers to. I have no idea where your brother is, Claire. But I do know that you need to go home, now, before something happens that we both regret."

The box closed, leaving her staring at Chris's unconscious face and wondering why the woman seemed so very familiar.


	15. My Ghosts Are Gaining On Me

' _Don't go, Claire', she wanted to whimper, but didn't. It was like her mouth suddenly couldn't work or her voice had gone away, leaving her only able to watch as her new little family broke apart._

_She supposed she should've known that it couldn't last. Nothing ever did for Sherry Birkin._

" _That's not true," Claire was shouting, color rising on her face. She stood several feet away from Leon, her shoulders tense and her hands clenched at her sides, radiating the same anxious negativity her mother always had whenever she had fought with her father. "I don't_ just _care about my brother, but I_ have _to find him! What if Umbrella has him?!"_

_Leon shook his head, laying his good arm over Sherry's shoulders and pulling her back against him. His other arm was wrapped at the top with bloody bandages, but she didn't know what had happened to injure him._

" _Then go," he said simply, his voice clipped. "Just go. Find him, if it's so important to you. Sherry and I will be fine on our own. There has to be an army barricade around here somewhere."_

_Sherry held her breath, watching a multitude of emotions flicker over Claire's face. And for a moment, just an instant, it almost looked like she was going to stay with them._

_But then she glanced around at the surrounding wilderness and said: "You've lost a lot of blood. What if there are more of those things around?"_

" _I think I can manage," he grit out. "Just leave us alone."_

_Claire swallowed heavily, but nodded, pulling out her gun. "I—I'll be back. I promise I will, Sherry. I just have to find him . . ."_

_Sherry watched numbly as she walked away, her silhouette growing smaller and smaller against the rising sun on the horizon. Eventually she vanished out of sight, and she never came back._

_It made Sherry feel forgotten, like she didn't even exist, wasn't important enough to return to. Her parents were gone and Leon had left her once they'd reached quarantine and Claire's brother mattered more to her than some little girl she'd met and helped during a crisis, and for the first time in her life, she felt truly, utterly alone._

_But then, she realized that she wasn't alone. Someone remembered her._

_Uncle Albert did._

.

Her radio was spitting static. Unsurprising, considering its mangled condition, but she nonetheless pulled it out of her pocket and held it up to the dim light coming down from the elevator's ceiling, fumbling with the buttons and dials on its surface.

The static became a high screech, then a low groan, eventually evening out into something in between, human voices gradually filtering through it until they were audible.

It wasn't HQ.

". . .—ceeding as planned . . . –oaded . . . agents . . ." The voice was female, and she was able to place it easily enough, considering she'd heard it fifteen minutes ago: it belonged to the blonde woman from the screen, though it was noticeably lacking the mocking, irritating lilt it had had then.

Someone replied to her, but the words were too jumbled by the static for her to understand. A quick glance at the cracked display screen told her that it wasn't set to any of the usual channels they used to communicate, but was apparently picking up someone else's signal.

". . . where's Gionne? Isn't . . . supposed to . . . for this?"

". . . medical attention . . . urgent . . . almost fatal . . . broken ribs . . ." The person replying was male, and he had a British accent, a very, very familiar British accent that made Claire's stomach lurch—

". . . fine . . . –side and I will intercept . . . laboratory . . . yes, Wesk—"

The radio crackled and died. Claire stared at it, only distantly aware that Sheva had begun to talk.

"'Gionne'? As in,  _Excella_  Gionne? I recognize that name! She's the head of Tricell's African Branch, a—an officer in the Global Pharmaceutical Consortium! How could she—?" Sheva trailed off, noticing Claire's stony silence. "What's wrong?"

"Not this," she breathed, shaking her head. "Not him. Not now. I can't deal with it now."

"With who?" she asked concernedly.

"I—I recognized the male voice. It's . . . Albert Wesker's. He must be the 'third party' the woman mentioned."

"The man who you thought killed your brother? He's  _here_?"

"Some part of me thought he was dead . . . wished he was. But people like that never really die, do they? Unless . . ."

Sheva shot her a long, hard look. "You said you wanted him to pay."

"Even before that night, he put my brother through a lot. He ruined his life, not to mention a lot of others. He deserves to suffer, and to die . . . and I want to be the one to do it. But it is much easier said than done."

"He's just a man, Claire. I'm sure—"

"But he's not. He's—he's a monster. A thing. On the outside he might look human, but inside he's just like all those creatures we've fought. And he can do things . . ."

"Things?"

"Dodge bullets. Move with inhuman speed. On Rockfort Island, when we first met, he hit me several times—it was like being run over by a truck. From what Chris said, he probably also has increased healing abilities. He must be some kind of Tyrant, but I don't know what, exactly, he's infected with, why he hasn't mutated. And now he's here." She shut her eyes tightly. "We're so close to finding Chris. Why now? There've been so many missions, why this one?"

"Maybe we won't see him?"

She shook her head. "We'll see him. He'll come to us—I think he enjoys confrontation. And I have no idea how we're going to be able to deal with him."

.

Chris panted heavily in an attempt to catch his breath, adjusting his legs so that he was lying more comfortably against Wesker's chest. Even with the air conditioner running at full blast, it was still extremely hot, and Wesker's black leather outfit seemed to absorb the heat, making it unpleasant to lie against.

Still, he did so, trying and failing to enjoy the aftereffects of his orgasm. There was just too much on his mind for him to focus or relax, too many images of Claire forcing their way into his mind's eye, bringing along with them a feeling of anxiousness like he'd never experienced before in his life.

Of course, Wesker noticed, staring at him closely with a small frown on his face and an unreadable expression in his glowing red eyes. Slowly, he ran his hands down Chris's sides, digging his fingers into his hips.

"The BSAA Agents are getting very close to us, Chris," he said, very softly. "Birkin is going to try to stop them one more time, but I'm fairly certain she is going to fail. And then . . ."

Chris shut his eyes, resting his forehead against Wesker's shoulder. However, Wesker reached up and grabbed his chin, forcing their gazes to meet.

"Do you know what that means? Do you understand that I, that  _we_ , are going to have to do this personally? Do you understand what that entails?"

— _Claire as newborn, her red hair only a fine dusting over her head, Claire as a little girl, playing with the other children on the playground, Claire as a teen, with her first motorcycle, Claire as an adult, beaming beatifically at her wedding—_

"I understand," he murmured, looking away. "Anything for you, Wesker."

.

"Did I not tell you, explicitly, to  _go home_?"

Claire ripped her gaze away from the seemingly cataleptic man in front of her and looked up, trying to find the place in the laboratory the echoing voice originated from. Up and off to her right was a long window that overlooked the entire laboratory, and at it stood the blonde woman. She looked annoyed, her arms crossed over her chest and her fingers tapping out a rhythm just above her elbows.

Behind her stood another figure, seemingly a man, who had his head tilted down, revealing only a shock of red hair.

Claire gritted her teeth, though internally, it struck her as odd that an agent of Wesker's would be giving her an opportunity to run away. Wouldn't he want her dead? "And I thought  _I_  told  _you_  that I had to find Chris! Of course I'm not going to go home!"

The woman sighed, rolling her eyes. "Chris . . . Chris . . . Chris . . . where have I heard  _that_  before? Oh yes, ten years ago. You really haven't changed at all, have you?"

Claire's response died on her tongue as the words sunk in, leaving her confused. She didn't  _know_  this woman, even if she did look . . . look  _familiar_  . . .

"Ten years?" she forced out.

"What?" the woman barked, feigning surprise. "You don't  _remember_  me? Is it because I'm not wearing the jacket?"

The woman looked quite a lot like Annette Birkin—the same general facial structure and build, the same hair and eye color—but Claire could also spot some resemblance to photos she had seen of William Birkin.

It was amazing how much a twelve year old girl could change in a decade.

"Sherry?" she demanded, her eyes wide. "Sherry  _Birkin_?"

"Yes," she confirmed shortly.

"You know her?" Sheva asked, glancing in between them.

"I—she was the little girl I met in Raccoon City, we escaped together, we—my God, Sherry, why—how are you—I thought you were sent to live with relatives! What happened to you?! Why are you here?! Are—" Her voice became a rasp. "Are you working for  _Wesker_?"

"My father knew Wesker quite well, Claire. They were friends. I bet you never knew that. So, after Raccoon City, he was the only one I had left. I don't have 'relatives'."

This was not happening. This. Was. Not. Happening. That was the only thought she could manage. Sherry Birkin was  _not_  a bioterrorist, so therefore, this was impossible.

"But—but Sherry, you had me! You had Leon! We cared for you—"

Sherry paused, clicking her tongue. Her gaze slid away from them, over onto the man sitting in the chair. As they watched, his skin began to ripple, like something was crawling around underneath of it.

"He's adapting very well," she said, sounding appreciative. "Most of them mutate by this time."

Claire shook her head, looking on in horror. How could this be the innocent little girl she'd met in Raccoon City? How could she participate in something like this?

"So," Sheva was saying, even as she backed up, "Kijuju is just one big testing ground for Wesker, is it? So he can sell Uroboros to terrorists later?"

Sherry shrugged, and the man began getting up out of his seat, jerking awkwardly as he took a step forward. "Uroboros is a bioweapon, yes. A very effective one, as you're about to see."

"Sherry! This is insanity! How can you be going along with this?! You're hurting innocent people!"

"I told you: go home, Claire. There's nothing for you here."

"I know Chris is here!"

The man abruptly halted, the jerking becoming more intense until he was writhing in pain, blood leaking from his mouth and eyes and scalp.

"Did you ever think it might be better for all parties involved if you just stopped? That your being here is . . ." She trailed off, shaking her head. "I suppose you'll see eventually."

The man's skin began rippling again, but this time it didn't stop; instead, a mass of wriggling black tentacles exploded out of him from within, ripping open his skin and slithering out of his mouth. He kept growing in mass until he was gigantic, stretching from floor to ceiling.

"I am sorry, Claire," said Sherry quietly, following the redheaded man out the office door.

.

Burnside leaned against the wall, looking thoughtful as he listened to the muffled sounds of gunshots and explosions the next room over.

"You knew Claire?" he asked, watching her carefully as she paced the room. "You never mentioned that."

Sherry froze, her head snapping towards him. "You're talking like  _you_  knew Claire."

"Of course I did."

"When?"

"Ten years ago. We met on this island called Rockfort. Lovely vacation spot, really—a great view, a beach, an Umbrella prison camp, a cross-dressing sadist with multiple personality disorder, zombies—"

"Claire was imprisoned by Umbrella?"

"She broke into the company's HQ in France looking for information on her brother. As you can guess, it didn't go very well. That's how she ended up on Rockfort. Then Wesker came along looking for Alexia—ah, screw it. It's too complicated. Just: everyone got turned into zombies and there were a lot of explosions. Now, quid pro quo: you knew Claire? And not only that—you were involved in Raccoon City? Wasn't that like, a decade ago? How old are you?"

"I'm twenty three."

Steve blinked. "Then you must've been a goddamn badass little girl."

"Not . . . particularly. I—my father was a scientist for Umbrella. My mother, too. She told me to hide in the police station, and that's where I met Claire. I would've died if it wasn't for her . . ."

One of his eyebrows arched. "So . . . to clear it up, she saved your life eleven years ago and now you're trying to kill her to show your gratitude?"

The slap was strong enough to send him skidding along the wall, and when his face finally stopped stinging enough for him to open his eyes, Birkin looked angrier than he'd ever seen her.

"I—I—you—" The speechlessness was a first, too.

Glaring violently, she turned on her heels and stormed out of the room.

.

From his place perched on the balcony, Chris could hear gunshots, both from a pistol and a shotgun, and the piercing death cries of Lickers. All of the noises were muffled, seemingly far off in the distance, but he knew that the BSAA Agents were only just outside the door, a drawn bridge the only thing separating them.

"Remember, Christopher," Wesker hissed in his ear, his hand tight around his arm. "She's going to ruin  _everything_  that we've worked for. She'll take you away from me."

The thought of it, of a life without Wesker, sent shivers down his spine.

"I'll kill her before I let her do that," he whispered. "Nothing will stand in your way, Wesker. I promise."

Their lips came together in a bruising, rough kiss, and the doors in the front of the room flew open.

 


	16. One More Medicated Peaceful Moment

Occasionally, something happened that changed everything.

Everyone experienced this at least once in their life. The birth of a child, the death of a friend, a marriage or a divorce, an illness—by nature, people were not static. No one's life could ever remain the same for its entire duration.

Claire Redfield knew this as well as anyone, considering everything that had happened. Nothing ever stayed the same, there were no constants, not even death; normality was a lie and in the end, her entire world was just a fragile thing ready to be destroyed in an instant.

She should've seen it coming.

Should've, but didn't.

"Sherry! Sherry, stop! Freeze!"

Sherry did as commanded, her leather-clad shoulders stiffening and her arms dropping to hang limply at her sides. She was standing in the center of a large, dark room, facing double stone staircases that led up to a shadowed balcony.

"I suppose," she began, slowly turning so that she was half-facing her, "that I should applaud you again, Claire. You are just as . . . determined . . . as I remember."

"Put your—" Her voice trembled faintly. "Put your hands up, Sherry. You're—"

"You're under arrest," Sheva cut in, much more sternly. "Don't make this difficult."

Sherry stared at them for a long, pregnant pause, the arrogantly disdainful expression on her face so identical to Wesker's that it made Claire want to cry.

But then, she began to laugh, a full, shoulder-shaking, head-thrown-back laugh. "Oh, Claire, and you're still so  _amusing_  as well, forever fumbling around blindly searching for something you're not really sure of. Is it really  _Chris_  that you're looking for? Or is it something else, maybe just some sort of validation only he can give you? You just can't go on if big brother doesn't love you, is that it?"

Claire knew that Sherry was mocking her, that the words were insulting. But the guilt wouldn't let her get angry.

_Oh god, Sherry, how could I have let this happen to you?_

Sherry's laughter trailed off gradually and she just stood there, trying to catch her breath. "Well," she finally began, glancing over her shoulder. "Congratulations, Claire. You've finally found what you've been looking for. You finally get to see Chris,  _really_  see him, like you never have before. But I am afraid that he really can't validate anyone anymore, except, well . . ."

Sherry took a step backwards, and before Claire could react, a dark figure had jumped over the edge of the balcony and was on them, his hand curling tightly around her wrist until she was forced to drop her gun.

Sheva jumped for him and Claire lashed out with her free fist, and everything became a flurry of motion, of kicks and punches and blocks and dodges and pain as hits were landed.

It was the Man in the Cloak. She'd only seen him on occasion, the first time being back in the village, when they'd confronted Irving and he had arrived with a smoke grenade to rescue him. He was tall and muscular, but that was all she could tell—he wore a long black cloak with a hood he always kept pulled down over his forehead, which effectively kept his face shadowed.

She'd wondered who he was on and off throughout their ordeal, but now she could conclude with certainty that he was a lackey of Wesker's, who was obviously exceptionally trained.

Narrowly ducking under a large, gloved hand aimed at her head, she hit the floor and rolled to the side, grabbing her gun and turning in one fluid motion. She pulled the trigger without taking the time to aim properly, and the bullet missed its target by several inches. Instead of hitting his head, it skimmed the side of his hood and harmlessly embedded itself in the side of one of the staircases.

However, the man jumped away from them, stilling near the foot of the steps to adjust the hood.

"Sherry!" Claire screamed, ripping her gaze away from the man to the woman, who was quickly ascending one of the staircases. "Tell me where Chris is! Please!"

"Begging about him now, Miss Redfield? It would seem that you've become even more pathetic than I remember."

There are moments in life that Claire would never forget, emotions experienced during them that would make doing so impossible.

Looking away from Sherry and seeing Albert Wesker at the top of the other staircase, descending the steps at a leisurely pace, was one of those moments.

He hadn't changed at all since Antarctica—even his clothes still resembled the ones he had worn then. It was the same Wesker she had seen so frequently in her nightmares over the past three years, the same Wesker she always thought about shooting—stabbing—strangling—bludgeoning—killing—killing—killing.

But the rage and the loathing and the murderous impulses were tempered by something else: grief. Seeing the man who was the cause of it all made her mourn for everything she had lost, for the ruined remains of a life she no longer had.

She wanted to ask him 'why'.

_Why couldn't he have left Chris alone? Why had he taken so much away from her?_

"Wesker," she said, and the name tasted like ash on her tongue. "So you are here."

" _This_  is Wesker?" Sheva asked, her eyes flicking back and forth between them.

"Ah, Redfield . . . it's 'Agent', now, isn't it? How many years since I last had to endure your ramblings about your brother? Ten? Eleven? Oh, yes—the Ashford Umbrella Facility in Antarctica, December 1998. And now we're all back again . . ."

"Chris," she grit out. "I know you have him, where is he?"

"So we're a little slow on the uptake today, are we?"

" _ **Where is my brother**_?!" she shrieked, what little patience she might've once had vanishing at the sight of the condescending smirk on his face.

Wesker clicked his tongue, shaking his head and descending the last step. "So much  _anger_. And here I thought that after all this time, you'd be happier to see us."

There was something wrong with the way he had said that sentence. Some part of her, the part that wasn't blindingly angry, knew this and tried to figure it out, eventually coming up with the subtle stress he put on the word 'us'.

Us.

Wesker and . . . Sherry?

Us.

Us.

Happier to see us.

Us.

Wesker stepped up to the Man in the Cloak, his smirk changing into an ugly smile.

Us.

Us.

No.

Us.

 _No_.

Us.

In one quick, sickeningly quick, movement, Wesker reached up and pulled the cloak's hood down.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no,  _no_ ,  _ **NO**_ —

And there was Chris's face staring back at her.

.

It was like all the air had been sucked out of the room.

It was like time had stopped.

It was like nothing even existed, except for Chris and the horrible, horrible realization that was trying to force itself on her.

Chris looked exactly like he did in the two pictures she'd seen of him. He was blonde, very blonde, his hair almost white. His skin was much lighter than it ever could have been naturally, even lighter than Wesker's, and his eyes were no longer the deep blue they'd once been—now they were silvery, almost colorless, and so very, very cold as they stared into hers.

The expression on his face matched—it was something she'd never seen on him before, even when he'd looked at Wesker. Icy and uncaring, even cruel, and somehow barely even there, like he was hiding everything under a mask.

"C-Chris?" she stammered, choking on the knot in her throat. "Chris? It's—it's me, it's Claire."

Chris stared at her blankly.

"Chris!" she tried again. "It's me, it's your little sister, don't you—?"

"I know who you are, Claire," he said finally.

And then, he leaned back, to the side, pushing up against Wesker, who wrapped his fingers around his arm just above the elbow.

Wesker.

_The Man in the Cloak is a lackey of Wesker's._

_The Main in the Cloak is Chris._

_The Man in the Cloak works for Wesker._

_The Man in the Cloak is Chris. Chris would never work for Wesker._

_Irving worked for Wesker. The Man in the Cloak helped Irving. The Man in the Cloak is Chris. The Man in the Cloak works for Wesker. Chris works for Wesker._

"What . . . did . . . you . . .  _do to him_?!" she screamed, thrusting her gun up and at Wesker's face.

Wesker looked back at her calmly. "It's been three years, Redfield—perhaps it would be less time consuming to ask what I  _haven't_  done?"

Forgetting the gun, Claire lunged.

.

_Seven minutes. That's all the time I have to play with you. Seven minutes._

Claire ran. Wildly, blindly, not knowing where she was going or where she had come from. The hallway beyond the door Wesker had kicked her through had led into another hallway and then another, each identical and twisting and disorienting.

But she had to run. That's what she'd told Sheva, back in the room with the staircases.

"— _we can't fight him we can't shoot him he'll dodge the bullets we have to run don't shoot Chris please don't shoot Chris—"_

Run, run, run, run, run away from everything, away from Wesker and Sherry and Sheva and Chris, away from the truth and the realization and the grief and the guilt and the anger, just run and everything will be okay—

She turned a corner and ran into something hard and tall and covered in leather, and even as she ducked Chris was  _laughing_  and taking aim, missing her only by a hair.

"Don't do this, don't do this, Chris, please don't—"

"Shut up, Claire," he spat, grabbing for her. She dodged and rolled, crawling away on her elbows until she could manage to stand and start running again.

She had never been good at fighting in narrow, enclosed spaces, but she doubted that she would've been able to do anything better even if they'd been out in that open room again.

How do you fight your own brother?

"You've been causing so many problems for Wesker, you little bitch," Chris continued, stalking behind her at a deceptively slow pace.

"Chris! It's me, it's Claire! Snap out of it! Whatever hold Wesker has over you, you're stronger than it!"

"We've been waiting for you to die for three days, but you just  _won't_. But that's okay. Where everything else has failed . . . I'll succeed. And Wesker will love me even more for it . . ."

 _Love him_?

But she didn't have any time to think about it deeply. Moving around the next corner, she passed a stone sarcophagus and continued around through another doorway.

"And then," Chris announced, his voice growing loud and deranged, like one of the Ashford twins', "Wesker will finally be able to usher in the perfect New World, a glorious, advanced utopia which he will reign over as God, where useless human beings like you will not exist—!"

So  _that_  was the Uroboros Doomsday Plan.

It was so  _fitting_  for a narcissistic psychopath like Wesker.

"This is Wesker talking, not you! It's his craziness! It's what Wesker wants, not what you want!"

"I want what Wesker wants," he snapped.

"No you don't! I know you! You would be horrified by this! You hate Wesker, you—"

And even before she could blink, somehow he had caught up and his hand was around her throat, slamming her violently against the wall.

"I. Do. Not. Hate. Wesker," he said, punctuating each word with a shake. "And don't try to act like you know me that well, Redfield, you're just lying to me! Wesker tells me the truth, Wesker is—"

"Get off of her!"

A handgun went off and Chris hissed in pain, dropping Claire to put a hand over his arm. Gasping for air, she slid to the floor, but then Sheva was there and pulling her up and along out of the room.

Claire had never before realized how long seven minutes could be.

.

"Your time is up. I must admit, Redfield—I'm disappointed. We finally meet face to face and you run and hide? Pathetic."

Truly, Wesker had been expecting more out of the girl. She seemed to  _loathe_  him so much, but yet she hadn't even shot at him once. Instead, she'd decided to use stealth to wait it out.

A disappointing end to what could've been an interesting fight, but to keep his plan on track he couldn't waste anymore time. Chris had been doing as well as could be expected, and he had no doubt that he would eventually finish them off.

Taking the steps two at a time, he halted in front of the elevator doors at the top of the balcony and began pressing buttons on the keypad alongside them.

"We can't let him go!"

Two sets of pounding footsteps made him turn around and watch as Redfield and Alomar ascended the steps after him, their largest guns drawn.

One of his eyebrows arched. "Ah, and we finally emerge. But what, exactly, do you two intend to do?  _Arrest_ me?"

Chris was on them a second later, kicking Redfield's legs out from under her and elbowing Alomar in the stomach. Their guns soon clanked harmlessly to the ground, and he pulled Redfield's arm tight around her back, forcing her face-first into the floor.

"Chris!" she pleaded, and Wesker winced slightly. Was that the  _only_  word in her vocabulary?

"This isn't you! My god, this isn't you! Chris Redfield! Remember yourself!  _Please_!"

Wesker fully expected her neck to be broken in the next instant, for Redfield to reach down and twist and for a sharp, satisfying snap to echo through the room.

But it didn't.

Instead, Chris seemed almost frozen in place, his hands still tight around her arm and his foot pressing into her back but a distant expression on his face as he stared at her.

Wesker had seen a variation of that expression before, even as far back as when they had been in S.T.A.R.S. and Chris had insisted on talking about his 'beloved' little sister off at college.

Abruptly, Wesker decided that Uroboros didn't have to be precisely on schedule. A few minutes would make no difference whatsoever.

"Chris," he shouted, pointing to Alomar. "You get her.  _I'll_  take care of Redfield."

.

She was running again.

She still didn't know where she was going, or where she had been, but now she knew that she was running from something much worse than simply a realization.

She was running from Wesker, and he wasn't 'playing' anymore. His footsteps were light and fast and so close to her, maybe only just a hallway away.

And he was muttering to himself, harsh, quiet words hissed under his breath. Other than having clearly heard the word 'mine' once or twice, she didn't know what he was saying, but she didn't think it painted a very nice picture of his mental health.

If he found her, he was going to kill her. He wasn't going hesitate before aiming his gun at her head and pulling the trigger, or walking up and breaking her neck.

Claire didn't want to die.

Trying to catch her breath as quietly as possible, she found herself turning yet another corner, but as soon as she heard the sound of shouts and gunfire, she knew she'd gone in the wrong direction.

Somehow, she had circled all the way up to the second floor of the room and was now looking down on where Chris and Sheva were hiding behind pillars, shooting at each other.

And while it wasn't a dead end, the jump over the railing was too high and going for the steps was suicide—Wesker was close enough to see her before she could hide again or Chris might—might—

Turning, she darted back into the room she'd come out of and tried frantically to look for a hiding spot, finally finding one in a half-collapsed wall she ducked behind. She knew it wouldn't fool anyone for very long, but all she needed to do was wait for him to pass her . . .

Slowly, the footsteps grew louder. She held her breath, clenching her fists and watching through a small gap in the stone as Wesker passed by and out onto the balcony, never even looking in her direction.

"You know, Redfield," he began abruptly, glancing from side to side. "You're really not doing Christopher any favors with this. When my New World comes into existence, he'll be a god—but yet, you're attempting to drag him back down into the dregs of filthy humanity, just so he can be with you. So selfish."

She continued trying not to breathe, waiting for the opportunity to bolt.

Wesker was silent for a second.

Then:

"And these three years have been so satisfying with him by my side. He screams so beautifully when I fuck him."

The words hit Claire like a physical thing, the implications scratching into her head and conjuring up a million sick images she didn't want to see, and before she even knew what she was doing, she had pushed away from the wall and charged, jumping at Wesker and latching her hands around his neck as tightly as she could.

But he countered smoothly, bending her sore arm back and kicking her in the stomach. She stumbled and then she was falling, her arms and legs thrashing as she tried to stop her descent.

Of course, it didn't work, and she slammed into the stone floor, pain exploding in her head and back and legs.

A strangled scream tore from her throat.

"I thought that basic training dictates to  _never_  respond to a taunt, Redfield," said Wesker, laughing darkly. She could see him standing there above her, looking down at her expressionlessly through the sunglasses.

It seemed suddenly like he was so far away—all of it, so very far away, even the gun he was now pointing at her head.

But some part of her still knew that if he pulled the trigger, she was going to die.

That was the same part that still wanted to live.

"Chris," she rasped weakly. "Please, Chris, please help me . . ."

.

For Chris Redfield, life began with a shot.

Before the shot, before the needle piercing his skin and the bluish-green liquid sliding into his veins, there was nothing save for blurred, broken fragments of something that might've been memory, of people he might've known and places he might've been.

But life, his real life, began with a needle and a liquid and a shot. Wesker was there in that real life, and he was the one that gave the shots—many at first, but gradually, there were less and less of them until he only got one ever so often, frequently after a very intense dream.

What did Chris Redfield dream about?

He dreamt about mansions, about forests and Jill Valentine, about ice and a woman in purple laughing hysterically on a staircase and about a group called the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance and a struggle and a window and a fall, a long, endless fall.

Chris dreamed all of those things, but now, he was beginning to remember them.

He remembered the words  _Special Tactics and Rescue Service_ and  _Raccoon City_ , and he remembered the forest and the bodies and the dogs, the horrible demonic dogs, and Joseph Frost's bloody screams as they ate him alive.

He remembered Brad, the fucking coward, flying away, and he remembered the mansion, oh god how he remembered the mansion—

" _So it's—it's all been a lie?" he'd asked, his voice shaking as he stared down the barrel of Wesker's gun. "Ever since I first met you, all of it, everything. I don't even know you at all, do I?"_

_Wesker smiled, one of those serene smiles Chris had liked, loved, once. "Nothing's changed, Chris. You were just . . . unaware of my true profession. You still know me . . . maybe better than anyone else."_

"' _Nothing's changed?!'" he repeated, incredulousness and disgust and horror and grief all raging inside him. "'Nothing's changed?!' You_ _ **killed**_ _all of them! You led them into this mansion to die, for work! You killed them all!"_

" _But I didn't kill you."_

" _What?"_

" _I didn't kill you, Chris. When I shot Enrico, I could've shot you as well, but I didn't. I could've abandoned you to face Lisa on your own, but I didn't. I didn't kill you, Chris. I never even tried."_

" _But you're still a murderer, Wesker," he said softly. "Just because you didn't shoot me, doesn't change the fact you shot Enrico. It doesn't change the fact that you've killed so many people just for data."_

_The smile dropped off of Wesker's face in an instant, his lips twisting into an ugly scowl._

" _Hey, Chris, are you in—" Rebecca's sentence ended abruptly as Wesker shot her without even looking in her direction. She slumped in the doorway she had just come through._

" _Rebecca!" Chris shouted, trying to stand up. Wesker grabbed him around the waist, heaving him up and the side, over to stand beside an incubator._

" _Some part of me knew you wouldn't understand," he hissed, tightening his grip until it hurt. "I guess that was me asking too much of you. But one day, Chris . . . one day . . . maybe you will . . ."_

—Chris remembered the mansion and the laboratory and the Tyrant, and he remembered Raccoon City dying in a horribly beautiful flash of red and orange and Jill (Jill, Jill, Jill, best friend, Jill) telling him about the Nemesis and then Leon, that bastard Leon, calling about Claire.

— _oh god Claire was in Raccoon City what happened why was she looking for me I should've called I should've called what have I gotten her in to where is she now—_

He remembered Alexia Ashford, insane, beautiful Alexia laughing at Wesker as he asked for a sample of the T-Veronica Virus, and the firestorm that followed. He remembered Claire crying over Steve, dead, dead Steve Burnside, who now wasn't so dead, and Wesker, dead, dead Wesker who now wasn't so dead, either—

— _Sure I'm not human anymore! But just look at the power I've gained!—_

And Chris remembered another mansion. He remembered Ozwell Spencer's dead body lying out across the floor in front of Wesker's feet, and the fight, the struggle—

— _no not Jill he shouldn't kill Jill not her it should be me—_

—the fall that finally ended and the pain that followed, Wesker looking down at him first with blackness behind him and then white, bright white light and a whisper in his ear that he was going to live, with just a few more surgeries—

He remembered waking up and Wesker being there, and the slow, creeping horrible feeling of there being no escape, the realization that Wesker was never going to let him go. He remembered the first—second—third—forth—fifth—sixth time Wesker had sex with him after he woke up and no, no, no, no,  _I don't want it, not from you, not anymore please make it stop I want to die, I wish I'd died—_

'I wish I'd died' had become his mantra, even has he hung on to his one lifeline, memories of Claire, of his wonderful—amazing—beautiful little sister.

Claire.

But then, Wesker gave him a shot, and life began. He forgot everything, even Claire and Jill and Barry and Rebecca, all of his friends and family.

Wesker took their place.

It was pathetic how easy that was, pathetic because even after all of it, Chris still  _wanted_  Wesker, he still  _loved_  Wesker, still wanted to  _please_  him and be with him, even if he had to settle for the monster he had become.

He had killed for Wesker.

He had committed  _mass murder_  for Wesker.

And no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't seem to care about it.

But yet, as he watched Wesker raise his gun and point it at Claire's forehead, his finger moving to the trigger, some part of him that had been dead for a long time  _did_  care.

— _They watched as their parents were lowered into the ground together. Chris held Claire's limp hand, trying to hold back his own emotions as she wept openly._

_They were alone, now, except for the aunt they were being sent to live with in a few days. They had never even met her before, but suddenly, she was their guardian._

_They were alone, six feet of dirt separating them from the only people who had really cared._

" _I'll never leave you, Claire," he said, whispering it into her ear._

_She looked up at him, her eyes glassy. "You promise?"_

" _I promise. I'll always be there for you."_

_But he hadn't kept it.—_

"Claire . . ." he murmured.

"Chris . . . please, Chris, please help me . . ."

Wesker's finger began pulling on the trigger.

.

Pain.

Wesker suddenly, inexplicably, felt  _pain._  Also, his hand was no longer holding his gun, it having apparently fallen out of his grasp when the bullet pierced his palm.

Briefly, he was confused, but then, even as Redfield began attempting to struggle to her feet, he turned his head slightly to the left.

Chris was standing there, staring at his own gun as it slipped out of his hand.

"I just want it to stop," he muttered, resting his hands on his head and sinking to his knees. "All of it to stop . . ."

"Chris—" Redfield began, her speech slightly slurred.

"Run, Claire. You have to run. Get in the elevator."

"No, Chris, I can't leave you—"

"I said run!" he barked, picking the gun back up and shooting in her direction. She and Alomar fled through the open elevator doors, and he shot the control pad on the wall, closing them.

The room suddenly became very silent, their breathing the only noise.

"I'm sorry, Wesker," Chris said eventually.

Very slowly, Wesker removed his sunglasses. "No, Christopher. You aren't. But . . . you will be."


	17. My Whole Existence Is Flawed

Wesker had always been obsessed with Chris. Claire knew this, but she'd never given it much thought, never even really questioned the reason why.

_It was the Mansion_ , she'd always assumed vaguely,  _something that had happened that night when the S.T.A.R.S. teams had died. Or maybe, Wesker had always just disliked Chris, even when they'd worked together at the RPD—since when did someone like that even really need a reason for anything he did?_

Wesker despised Chris. He wanted to kill Chris. He was obsessed with Chris.

That was just the way it was. There didn't need to be a reason, or an explanation.

But now there was, a sick, twisted, horrible explanation that made bile rise in her throat, and no matter how much she tried, she couldn't ignore it or deny it.

Wesker wasn't just obsessed with Chris like an enemy was with enemy.

He was obsessed with Chris like a lover. Sexually.

That was the reason, had always been the reason, and she had just been too blind to see it, never having opened her eyes enough to fully register and understand the way they'd interacted in Antarctica.

Back then, her view of sex and romance had still been teenage; she hadn't been able to pick up on the lecherous lilt to Wesker's voice, or the innuendo under some of what he'd said.

But now, now it was glaringly clear, all of it, everything, even their current situation.

She'd wondered how Chris had lived through the fall.  _If he didn't die, then how could he live?_

Now she had the answer, and as she thought about all of the implications of it, what had been happening to her brother for the past three years, she couldn't hold back the bile.

Her world spinning, she collapsed in the side of the elevator and gagged.

"Claire," Sheva was saying desperately, "Claire, please, did you break anything? Did you hit your head? It was such a long drop from that balcony . . . Are you okay?"

She felt fingers on her hair, gently pulling it back behind her shoulders.

"I—I'm not—I'm not okay," she choked out, her voice shaking. "C-C-Chris . . . my God . . . not this . . . how could this have happened . . .?"

"I don't know," she said gently. "He must've done something to him, brainwashing or drugs or something. But he saved you in the end. Whatever hold Wesker had over him, it's gone now. He still loves you."

"But Wesker still has him," she rasped, pushing away and practically falling against the button panel. Still dizzy, she slammed awkwardly at the 'up' control, but the elevator didn't move.

"Why isn't this working?!" she shrieked, hitting it violently. "We have to—we have to go back and—"

Sheva's hand shot out and gripped her wrist tightly. "We can't go back."

" _We have to_!"

"We  _can't_."

"He'll kill him!"

"Claire," Sheva breathed, true sympathy in her eyes. "I know this hurts, and I'm so sorry. But there's nothing we can do for Chris anymore. This elevator is the only way back up and it's not working."

"Then there has to be another way! A—a staircase, or  _something_!"

"We don't have time to look for one. We have to stop Uroboros. You heard just as well as me what Wesker plans to do with it."

"Didn't you hear me: he's going to  _kill_  my brother—!"

"Everyone on Earth, Claire," she said, each word enunciated clearly. " _Everyone_. Every man, every woman, every  _child_ —he's going to kill all of them, if we don't stop him."

Claire stared at her through her teary eyes, feeling a lump form in her throat.

"It's what Chris wanted us to do," she said, slowly letting go of her wrist.

Claire thought about everyone she knew, about Leon, about Rebecca and Billy with their first child coming into two months and about Barry and his family, about Jill and Carlos getting ready for their wedding in a week and about little Rani Chawla in India, and even about all of her coworkers and neighbors, people she passed on the street or briefly met in shops, only to trade polite chitchat with as she checked out.

So many people, and in a way, each so beautiful.

Wesker was going to take all of it away.

Chris wouldn't want that.

"I—I'm not too injured," she said, laboriously standing. Her knees were shaking and everything ached, but she'd had far worse before. Wesker kicking her in the face on Rockfort Island had been much more painful.

"Are you sure you can walk by yourself?"

"Yes . . ." Claire demonstrated, stepping out of the open elevator doors and onto the adjoining platform, where she found herself staring at the largest ship she had ever seen. It was massive, blocking out most of the setting sun on the horizon with its bulk.

"An oil tanker of some sort?" Sheva asked.

"With Sherry Birkin getting on board," Claire said sullenly, watching as the woman quickly disappeared off the loading ramp into the hull.

Sheva pulled her submachine gun off her back, holstering her pistol.

"I say . . . we follow her."

.

"Are you saying I was manufactured?" he had asked, once, and Spencer hadn't denied it.

_Are you saying,_ he'd wanted to ask _, that I was never human to begin with? That it wasn't my choice, to become what I am? That I've always been a monster, even before I knew what the word meant?_

_Are you saying I'm not even a person?_

But he hadn't asked any of that, and Spencer had started talking about godhood, and how he had been so close to obtaining it.

_Could a god be manufactured?_

Then Wesker had killed him, because Spencer was too disgusting to live.

_Are you saying I was manufactured? Are you saying my entire life has been a lie, Spencer? Is that what you're saying?_

But a corpse, unfortunately, cannot answer questions.

Chris Redfield, however, could.

Chris was a human being. He was a person, an individual, a mix of genetics and organics with a mind and a consciousness and maybe even a soul.

It was disgusting, so disgusting, but in another way, it was . . . magnificent.

Chris was  _real_ , real in a way Wesker never had been and never could be. And while Wesker hated him for it, he also loved him for it as well.

He mattered to Chris as a  _person_. Chris saw him not as a thing or a monster or a pawn, but as something real, as a lover, as someone he experienced emotion for and cared for.

Somehow, Chris answered all his questions, even without him asking them. In a way, he always had, even before that night three years ago.

And that was why he was never going to let him go. He would kill anyone, everyone, before he let him go, rip Redfield's pretty little head off with his bare hands and feed it to Alomar until she choked to death on her own vomit.

Wesker laughed darkly at the thought, almost hysterically, and clicked through the controls for the cameras scattered throughout the tanker until he found one that showed the two little bitches, talking between themselves.

" _You and your brother must've done something to really piss him off."_

" _It . . . I think it's a little deeper than just 'pissing him off' . . ."_

They were making progress, descending deeper and deeper into the bottom decks.

Bracing himself heavily against the terminal in front of him and almost losing his balance as his hands began to slip in the blood covering them, he glanced up at the monitor showing the Uroboros warheads being loaded.

It wasn't anywhere near being done. He needed more time.

Tapping his fingers against the metal in a slow rhythm, he looked from monitor to monitor, trying to find anything that would prove to be a suitable distraction—

And he saw Excella Gionne lying in the medical wing.

.

Viruses like G and T-Veronica were notoriously unstable.

No matter how carefully it was introduced into the body, how closely the dose was monitored or how well the host's genetic structure was able to adapt to it, it would eventually take its toll. And, inevitably, the host would mutate, losing all sense of self as he or she did so.

However, like he did with many, many laws of nature, Wesker had found a way to avoid this.

How long it had taken to develop whatever was in the shots he took regularly Steve didn't know, nor did he even know what it did to keep him from mutating. Steve supposed he should've taken more interest in it, considering it was only a matter of time before he needed his own daily injection, but the only thing that had ever really caught his attention about it was that, when too much was introduced into the system, it had side effects.

Severe side effects, like a poison or a drug overdose.

It would make Wesker . . . almost weak, for a limited period of time.

And while Steve honestly didn't have any sort of grudge against Wesker, he decided that he'd throw Claire a proverbial bone, just for old times' sake. (Or maybe, just to get that distant, disturbed look off of Birkin's face.)

It wasn't like it would actually  _kill_ Wesker, but it could very well  _save_  Claire.

Of course, that was providing she could even inject him with it. That was a flaw in the plan that he hadn't really thought of, but now, it was too late.

"Freeze! Freeze, and drop it, now! Then put your hands on your head and turn around, slowly!"

Burnside dropped it, the case of syringes clanking to the floor, and ran.

.

The fucking doctor had given her  _one_  painkiller.

_One. Fucking. Painkiller._

That hadn't even numbed the pain in her scalp, much less the agony lancing through the rest of her body.

She had informed him of that, loudly, but he'd just muttered something in a language other than Swahili or English and walked away, tapping his pen against his clipboard.

If she hadn't known that everything was going to end in a few scant hours, she would've placed a call and had him dragged off to one of the laboratories.

Not that she could place a call, of course.

_Her goddamned fingers were broken_. All of them.

Her beautiful, slender fingers were now twisted and mangled, hideous, horrible.

But yet, they were wonderful compared to her face.

It made the anger boil up deeply inside her, hot and sharp and lancing. How  _ **dare**_ Redfield do this to her? How  _ **dare**_ he, when all she had been trying to do was open Albert's eyes to what her natural place should be in the New World?

She was only able to take solace in the fact that her pain wasn't going to continue for much longer. As soon as Uroboros detonated, she would merge with it and finally become a goddess, a perfect, enhanced, magnificent being.

And she doubted that Redfield's filthy DNA would even be able to accept it.

She took to staring at the clock, silently bemoaning the fact that she wouldn't be able to physically be by Albert's side as the world was changed forever, but then, suddenly, an hour and a half before detonation, the door to her room opened and  _he_ walked in.

"Excella," he said, and she almost shuddered. She loved it when he said her name.

"I came as soon as I could," he continued, shaking his head and looking her over carefully.

He wasn't wearing his sunglasses. Excella had never seen him without them before, and his eyes certainly weren't the . . . color . . . she had imagined.

"And I feel I should apologize, for Chris's actions." He stepped towards her slowly. "I'm afraid that he is quite unstable at times, and very easily provoked. Jealous, if you will."

He sat down on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping slightly under his weight.

"Are—" She paused, coughing to clear her voice. "Are you saying that you understand that he's not worthy of you, Albert? That, that I—"

Wesker cut her off, laughing. "Oh, oh no, Gionne, don't misunderstand—I'm simply mourning the end of a profitable business relationship."

And then, the needle was out from behind his back and sliding into her abdomen.

 


	18. You Forced My Hand and Made Me Do

Excella had always been one of the lucky ones.

She'd grown up watching her mother and sisters spend at least three or more days each month sprawled around the house, moaning and bitching and complaining about the utter (and, perhaps, as she'd thought at the time, exaggerated) agony that came with menstrual cramps.

Heating pads, ice packs, and little white pills had been passed around like party favors, but none of it seemed to do very much for them. Excella had spent several years in terror of this horrible pain she knew she was inevitably going to one day experience, dreading age eleven, and then twelve, and finally thirteen, when the time finally came.

But the pain hadn't been there. Unlike her mother and sisters, she didn't routinely get cramps, and even when one did flare up low in her stomach, it wasn't very intense.

Lucky, her sisters had called her.

Lucky, lucky Excella.

She'd never really understood the concept of 'irony' as much as she currently did, staggering blindly forward on a sprained knee and a fractured ankle, with her arm in a sling and her hands in casts and a bandage around her head and pain, lancing, excruciating pain building in her abdomen.

It was sharp, hot, burning, like someone was inside her with a knife, cutting and mutilating her organs, accompanied by searing, involuntary contractions of her muscles, violent, uncontrolled spasms that sent a new jolt of pain through her every time.

There was pressure, too, so much pressure, like a thousand pounds was pushing out of her from within, trying to rip her apart. It ground up and out, spreading behind her broken ribs and up towards her palpating heart, which only started beating faster.

It hurt, oh god, it hurt more than anything she'd ever experienced in her life, a million times worse than even Redfield's beating. It was unbearable, past any and all thresholds she might've had, but she  _couldn't_ escape it. There was no way out, no way to make it stop, not even a black, unconscious oblivion to fade into, because she just couldn't  _faint_.

Was this what Uroboros felt like? Was this  _rebirth_? Didn't all births require pain, and blood, and screams?

No. No, not like this. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

She was supposed to have merged with Uroboros upon detonation, like everyone else.

But Wesker had injected her early, a dark, demented gleam in his eyes as the syringe's plunger hit the bottom of the barrel, emptying all of the virus into her body.

" _I don't think," Redfield had said, his hand tight in her hair, "that you understand that Wesker has no interest in you personally. Tricell is providing funding and you happen to be Tricell's representative. He puts up with you for that reason, and that alone."_

Excella Gionne was not a deep person. She had spent most of her life being incredibly and quite purposefully vain, relying on her looks and her family name to get her what, and who, she wanted.

She'd never learned not to play with fire.

But now, in the moment of retrospect the virus allowed her as it began tearing its way into her DNA, she realized that Redfield had been right.

Albert Wesker was a dangerous man, possibly—probably—even a mentally unstable man, and he had used her just like he seemed to use everyone else.

And for all her experience with men, she'd been too naïve to understand that she was getting in too deep. She'd thought that she'd one day be able to wrap Wesker around her finger, but now, she realized that that was a foolish, impossible dream.

And as she died, the fleshy black tentacles sliding along under her skin for one long, suffocating moment before they finally pushed up and out, destroying everything that made her human, all she could hear was Wesker's cruelly amused voice—

_terribly sorry gionne but it appears uroboros has rejected you_

—and her own agonized screams.

.

The world was a haze, snippets of information coming to him in blurry fragments that he could barely process.

He was in pain, dull, aching pain all over his body that didn't seem to really be originating from anywhere but yet managed to be everywhere.

Why was he in pain?

_Wesker hit you. Wesker hit you a lot._

The thought was clearer than most of the ones floating around in his head, coming complete with distant flashes of burning, angry red eyes and unnaturally fast movement and dark whispers hissed in his ear that  _Claire Redfield doesn't matter, I'm the only one that matters, you belong to me, I own you, I've always owned you—_

Wesker did own him. Even now, as he lay on the floor in a tangled mess of blood and broken bones and ripped clothes, he could acknowledge that. Maybe, it had always been that way, ever since that day in 1996 when he'd walked into the RPD and seen him standing there, leaning calmly against the statue in the lobby.

Maybe that day, somehow, he'd been tainted, forever changed, and now, no matter how much he might've wanted to, there was no way to wash it off.

In a way, it was very simple.

But now, there was so much in his head, so many memories and feelings and stray thoughts that had been kept pinned down for so long suddenly forcing their way back into his consciousness.

And he didn't know what to think.

_Wesker is your lover._

_Claire is your sister._

_Wesker has hurt you._

_Claire wants to hurt Wesker._

_You wanted to hurt Wesker._

_You love Wesker._

_Wesker is a murderer._

_You became a murderer for Wesker._

_WeskerClaireWeskerClaireWeskerClaireWeskerClaire_

He just wanted it to stop, to go to sleep for a little while ( _or forever, please let it be forever)_ so he wouldn't have to think about it.

But instead, he lay on the floor, awake and in pain, and listened to voices from somewhere far away.

"Where's my brother, Wesker, where is he? What have you done to him?" Frantic, angry, oh Claire, why even try?

"Chris is no longer your concern. He is where he belongs."

"You sick, twisted freak!"

"Sticks and stones, Redfield."

A derisive laugh, almost condescending, very unlike Claire. "You're pathetic, Wesker. Do you honestly think Chris  _wants_  to be with you? He hates you! He thinks you're—"

A pained moan, the voice different than Claire's.

"Is—is that Excella Gionne?" Accented, young, Alomar's. "What happened to her?"

"W—Wesk—er—" Choked, strained, hoarse. "W-why—? Why?"

"Agent Redfield just doesn't know when to stop," said Wesker, his voice clipped, his accent thicker than usual. "So why not make her?"

"Wes—Wesker—please—"

"Terribly sorry, Gionne, but it appears Uroboros has rejected you."

Then suddenly, there were horrible, wet, snapping noises, agonized screams from Gionne and shouts of surprise from Claire and Alomar, and the click of Wesker shutting off the microphone and speakers.

Silence, footsteps, and Wesker was touching him, sliding his hands through his hair and moving in between his legs, his fingers curling around old-new bruises as he gripped the same places he had only a short while earlier.

Chris still hurt from then, but he could only lay there limply as Wesker slid back inside him, making him bite his lip roughly.

"Just a little while longer," Wesker muttered against his neck. "Just a little while longer . . ."

.

Sherry didn't mind the fact that everyone on earth was going to die in less than an hour. She'd never really had any particular type of affinity for other human beings, had always been unsocial, perhaps even verging on misanthropic; she'd never truly had  _friends_  at school, nor ever a boyfriend, no one to talk to or laugh with.

And while she supposed that, to some degree, she cared for Wesker, she knew very well that the feeling wasn't returned. He didn't  _dislike_  her, but he didn't  _love_  her, like a godfather probably should love his godchild.

Therefore, it was very difficult to be concerned about a species that one was so incredibly neutral about. She firmly believed that Uroboros detonation would ultimately make the world a better place, cleanse it of the filth that had been allowed to build up for the thousands of years humanity had prospered.

She was fully prepared to sit back and watch it all happen, and even humor Wesker's fervent belief in his own divinity, if the situation so called for it. He was as good a god as any, she supposed.

Sherry didn't mind that everyone on earth was about to die, but yet, no matter how hard she tried to repress and ignore it, she did seem to care that Claire Redfield's demise was going to be the prelude to it.

And it was shocking how perceptive Burnside could be.

"Slut-cella is dead," he singsonged in her ear, his breath a wisp against the side of her face.

"Personal space," she said. "Do not violate it."

He rolled his eyes, backing away to instead stand beside her by the porthole she was looking out of. From the angle, they could just barely see the last remaining tentacles of what had once been Excella Gionne twisted around the sides of the ship.

"Aren't you glad she's dead? She hated you almost as much as she hated Redfield."

"I believe she thought, based solely on my gender, that one day I'd try to seduce Wesker. Apparently the woman had no concept of the term 'father-figure'."

Steve slowly turned back to her, the light expression he usually wore vanished. He stared at her for a long moment, unblinking. "Do you care for Wesker?" he finally asked.

She shrugged. "I've known him since I was a child, I guess I do."

"But . . ." He hesitated. "Do you care for Claire, too?"

Sherry's gaze snapped up to meet his. "What?"

"You . . . you're guilty about what you're doing to her, aren't you? About what's going to happen? You don't want her to die."

There were a thousand things she could say back to him, all denials and evasions.

But she just didn't have the energy, not anymore.

"No," she admitted. "I don't particularly want her to die. At least . . . not because of me. It just doesn't seem right, after what happened in Raccoon City."

He was expressionless for a moment, but then a smile spread over his face. Grabbing her arm, he pulled her in the direction of the communications equipment in the corner of the room.

"Then you are going to be  _very_  happy about what I have to tell you . . ."

.

"You really have no real concern for your own safety, do you?"

Claire froze, only to swivel around almost immediately to face the opposite side of the bridge. There was a television screen hanging in the corner, and over the spinning Tricell logo, a box had popped up.

And, like in the massive room with the incubators, Sherry was once again the one on the screen.

"I have a  _concern_  for the safety of—of  _everyone_  in the world, which you apparently do not share. And I have a  _concern_  for getting Chris away from that goddamned, obsessed, delusional—"

"'Obsessed' is a good word for it. Wesker is, indeed, very obsessed with your brother, dangerously so. But what you don't seem to understand is that the feelings are _reciprocated_. Chris is practically  _fanatical_  when it comes to Wesker—I've seen him do horrible things for him, murder without a second thought just because he asked—"

"That's because Wesker did something to him," she snarled. "I don't know what yet but we're going to find out, as soon as we go home."

"Go home? So, you plan to ride off into the sunset? Play the hero and stop Uroboros and 'rescue' Chris when all you're really doing is making things worse for him—"

"How could I possibly be making things worse?!"

"Wesker likes to believe that he's the focal point of Chris's world, but with you here, I'm afraid he's being forced into the realization that that isn't entirely true. And, with that realization comes . . . well, problems for your brother."

The fear that she had been trying to suppress bubbled up in full force. "He's—he's not—"

"He's alive, don't worry about that. Worry about yourself."

"What am I supposed to do, Sherry? Just sit here while Uroboros detonates? As a BSAA Agent it's my job to stop it, by whatever means necessary!"

Sherry gave a long suffering sigh, her eyes briefly flicking to something off screen. "Fine. Fine, Claire. You know what? You win. Since you  _insist_  on this, on taking on what basically amounts to a G Creature with intelligence, I'm going to tell you about something that could save you when the time comes. The shots."

Claire blinked. "What?"

"The shots, the syringes the man dropped when you were on one of the lower decks. Did you pick one up?"

Slowly, Claire undid the zipper on one of her vest's pockets and withdrew the syringe. It was long and thin and filled with an opaque liquid, with small writing across the surface.

"Yes, I took one with me."

"Good, because in that syringe is, shall we say, Wesker's Achilles Heel."

Claire jerked like she'd been slapped. " _What_?"

"I don't know the entire story, but Wesker gets his unnatural abilities from a special dose of the G-Virus that my father developed for him some eleven years ago. However, while Wesker didn't experience uncontrolled mutations like most G-Virus carriers, over time, he began to have . . . problems. In response, he synthesized the serum in the syringe you now hold. It takes care of everything, so long as he takes a precise amount. But, as with any drug, he can overdose on it if he is exposed to too much in too short a time. And he's already taken his shot for the day. Another would constitute 'too much'."

"Will it . . . kill him?"

"No. It'll just . . . blur his vision and lower his hand eye coordination, things like that. He probably wouldn't be able to dodge bullets, but that doesn't mean he's suddenly susceptible to them, either." She hesitated. "Use it wisely, Claire. It's the only way you can survive this."

She stared at it, the innocuous little thing lying across her palm. It was so small, but . . . could it really be what she'd been searching for? A way to end Wesker's life once and for all, to free Chris from his influence and let them live out the rest of their lives in peace?

"Why are you telling me this?" she found herself asking. "I thought you were on Wesker's side."

Sherry was silent for a moment, her eyes focused down on her lap.

"I can never . . . forget Raccoon City," she finally said, and the screen went black.

.

For the rest of their journey through the tanker, the syringe was a comforting weight in her pocket.

Even as Reapers and Majini descended on them from everywhere, guns firing and stun rods swinging, she felt somehow secure, as though it was armor.

And even as a tight, anxious feeling welled up in her as they reached a door with the Tricell logo printed across it, a door leading into what the map declared to be the hangar bay, she still managed to be calm.

She held the secret to defeating Wesker, and to her, it might as well have been the secret to the universe.

The door opened.


	19. Your Halo Slipping Down To Choke You Now

Humans were largely reflexive by nature, and Claire was no different.

So when she saw the sunglasses hurtling through the air at her head, she didn't take the time to think about it before she removed one of her hands from her gun and reached up to grab them.

If her mind  _had_  been able to catch up with her reflexes in that second, she might've wondered why Wesker would remove something he always kept so close to him and throw it at her when he was already holding a gun in his hands, or at least be disgusted by the thought of touching something that had actually sat on the man's face, rubbed against his skin and hair.

But she hadn't been able to think of any of those things and instead, she had reached up and caught the glasses, raising her arms upwards.

Wesker promptly kicked her in her exposed chest, and the sheer force of it sent her flying off her feet and backwards into Sheva, pain exploding out from the impact point. Flailing, she gasped wildly for air, immediately trying to regain her balance even as Wesker plucked the glasses from her hands and put them back on his face, following up by slamming his handgun against the side of her head.

Sheva's gun went over Claire's shoulder, jerking against her as she fired off several rounds at him. He dodged and went back on the offensive, grabbing Claire's arm and flinging her against the wall, which she felt actually  _dent_.

Impossibly, he was hitting much harder than he had on Rockfort. He was hitting harder than  _anything_  she had ever fought before, more than even Birkin and his methodically stabbing claws or Alfred's Tyrant with its bulbously muscled hands.

He would be able to kick  _through_ her if he had enough momentum, rip a hole in her chest and leave her lying dead on the floor like he had Ozwell Spencer three years ago.

She had to inject him, somehow, someway, and soon, or both she and Sheva were as good as dead.

Pushing away from the wall, she dived for her gun, dodging another punch aimed at her stomach, and reached it, but in the time it took for her to turn and begin firing, Wesker had kicked Sheva's legs out from under her and wrapped his arm around her neck, the barrel of his gun pressing against her temple.

"Let her go, Wesker," Claire hissed. "You don't have a problem with her."

"Of course I do, Redfield. She's helping  _you_." Wesker's voice lacked the usual calm condescension it usually carried; instead, there was a rough, agitated edge to it, along with some undertone that almost made her shudder.

She'd never really thought of Wesker as  _insane_  before, just methodical and completely amoral, a cold, calculating, greedy son of a bitch with some kind of pathological need for power.

But this, Kijuju and Uroboros and what he had done to Chris—it went  _beyond_ that.

And somehow, that scared her more than anything.

"Wesker—" Sheva began, only to gag as he tightened his grip, cutting her off.

Claire thought frantically, surveying the situation from as many angles as she could, looking between his gun and hers and then to the surroundings, trying to find something, anything to provide a distraction, even as she tried to come up with something to say, something that would provoke him—

But then Sheva had somehow managed to twist to the side and pull out her knife and slide it into Wesker's leg, stumbling away as his grip loosened.

Claire took the opportunity and ran past her, slamming into Wesker's side and sending both of them falling over the balcony's railing. He landed worse than she did, his head slamming into the concrete floor with an audible crack.

"How do you like it?" she snarled, fumbling for the syringe. However, he recovered too quickly for her to be able to reach it and lashed out, sending her tumbling across the floor like a thrown doll, her arms and legs cracking against the concrete as she spun and rolled.

Gritting her teeth against the pain, she managed to stop herself and staggered to her feet, turning and raising her gun even before she was fully oriented. She pulled the trigger as quickly as the gun allowed, sending the all of the remaining bullets at Wesker. Some went wide, but the majority of them were on target, flying directly at his abdomen.

And for a second, one glorious second, it looked like they were going to actually hit him.

But of course, at the very last minute, he flung himself to the side, his body becoming a blur of black. Almost instantaneously, just as the bullets slammed into a control panel behind him and the lights above flickered and died, he raised his own gun and fired off a round.

And he missed. The bullet skimmed past her, slicing painfully into the skin of her cheek but ultimately imbedding itself in the wall behind her.

Claire blinked, her hand automatically going up to touch the wound.

While she'd never personally seen Wesker fire a gun on a shooting range, when Chris had worked at S.T.A.R.S. she'd heard him mention on occasion the almost scarily accurate aim the Alpha Team's Captain had.

_I swear to God,_ he'd said once, sounding slightly impressed but envious at the same time,  _the man could hit the broad side of a fly._

But he'd just missed her, when he'd probably shot thousands of zombies in the head over the years.

And she didn't think it had anything to do with the fall.

"He can't see well in the dark!" she shouted, backing away and slamming a new magazine into her gun. "He can't see in the dark! Sheva, get the lights! Get the lights now! Destroy the controls!"

Across the room, there was a burst of gunfire and another section of the lights blinked out.

Claire turned, zeroing in on another panel a ways in front of her, and made a break for it, weaving to the sides spontaneously to make herself more difficult to hit.

In another corner of the room, another set of lights dimmed, and shortly afterwards, she shot the final set of controls, enveloping the room in darkness. It wasn't  _impossible_ to see, but it was certainly much more difficult than it had been, almost bad enough that she was afraid she'd stumble into something.

"Redfield!" Wesker roared, pure loathing in his voice.

"That's what you get for never taking off the sunglasses, asshole," she muttered, her eyes drawn over to a case sitting adjacent to the panel. Inside, below a thick layer of glass, was a weapon she was fairly unfamiliar with but still knew to be quite extraordinarily effective against most large-scale BOWs—a launcher, fully loaded with a rocket.

Pulling her knife out of its holster, she slammed it down into the glass twice in quick succession, using all of her strength. The second time, it shattered, and she grabbed the launcher, slinging it over her back.

She ran and took cover, ducking down behind the raised edge of a platform holding a massive Uroboros Missile.

Sheva soon joined her, sneaking around the corner with her back pressed to the edge.

"What do we do?" she whispered frantically, her voice hoarse. "He's so strong—"

Claire gestured to the weapon on her back. "This'll work, I know it will, but there's only one rocket, it  _has_  to hit him—"

"Hiding again, are we?"

Wesker's voice, and the accompanying footsteps, weren't dangerously close, but they weren't as far away as the other side of the hangar. However, she wasn't familiar enough with the layout of the room to guess where he was, and she recognized how big of a disadvantage that put her at.

"Why don't you just come out so we can get this over with?" he continued. "You've already wasted enough of my time as it is."

She stayed silent, her heart pounding frantically in her chest as she tried to come up with a plan.

"What? Nothing to say? Nothing at all, not even something about your brother? That's certainly a first."

He  _was_ getting closer, she could tell that much. Biting her lip, she pulled the launcher off her back.

"Good old Chris . . ."

"Go, go," she said quietly, gesturing unnecessarily even as Sheva turned the corner she'd originally come around.

". . . he's always so eager to please, in every way imaginable . . ."

"You're going to pay for what you did to him," she said, loudly enough to be echoing. His footsteps stopped abruptly and then, after a pause, seemed to change direction.

"What you did that night," she continued, inching backwards, her sweaty hand curled tightly around the syringe, "was the worst mistake you've ever made."

"Oh really?" he replied, sounding very, very close to her. "So, you're saying that it would've been preferable to you if I'd just left him to die?"

The way he'd twisted her words hurt, but she managed to keep herself on track.

"Now!" she shrieked, jumping out from her hiding place. Wesker had almost been right on her and was now in exactly the place she had anticipated, which also happened to now be directly in Sheva's line of fire.

The missile left the launcher with a hiss, sending Sheva stumbling backwards from the force, and headed directly for Wesker's back.

_Five feet, four feet, three, two, one, please don't let him dodge—_

He didn't dodge, but the missile didn't hit.

He.  _Caught_. It.

He had spun around and  _grabbed_ it only an instant before it had impacted, and now had his hands wrapped tightly around it as his arms strained under the pressure.

"Shoot it, Sheva!" Claire screamed. "Shoot it!"

Sheva dropped the launcher and drew her handgun, wildly firing off six rounds.

One or more hit the target, because the rocket exploded, sending Wesker staggering drunkenly backwards and tripping over his own feet, even as he tried to extinguish the small fires that had broken out on his clothes.

Claire charged at him, the syringe ready in her hand.

.

It took a lot of energy to struggle to his feet, energy that Chris was sorely lacking. According to his new, still largely jumbled memories, he'd been through quite a lot in the last decade, but as far as he could tell, this was the most pain he had ever been in. Almost everything hurt, especially his legs and arms, but he still managed to stand with the help of a chair, trying as best he could to straighten his clothes as he did so.

He had managed to button his pants by the time he finally limped the short distance across the room to the large, rectangular window that overlooked the hangar bay. The incredible amount of noise he'd been hearing from the room below was what had convinced him to get up in the first place and now he could easily see the source: Wesker was walking along the side of one the missiles while Claire and Alomar cowered in front of it, seemingly whispering between themselves.

This continued for a minute, but then, as he watched closely, he saw Claire pull something off her back and hand it to Alomar, gesturing for her to go around the corner.

A cold feeling gripped him as he recognized what the thing was: a rocket launcher. It was a different model than ones he had used in the past, but nonetheless the same thing, still extraordinarily powerful, enough to blow a Tyrant apart with one shot.

And from what he could see, Alomar sneaking around the side while Claire seemed to draw Wesker's attention away, Chris knew what they planned to do with it.

Chris hated Wesker. He hated him for what he'd done to the S.T.A.R.S. team that night, and he hated him for what he'd done to Rockfort Island, and for all the lives he'd thrown so carelessly away in the course of his work, all the suffering he'd caused. But most of all, and perhaps most selfishly, he hated Wesker for what he'd done to his life, for dragging him into a world he, by no right, should've ever been involved in.

Wesker had ruined his life.

But in a way, Wesker now  _was_  his life. He . . . loved Wesker, just as much as he hated him.

And nothing could ever erase the last three years.

Swallowing convulsively, Chris pushed away from the window.

.

The needle had almost been pricking Wesker's skin when it was suddenly wrenched out of Claire's hand.

Almost choking on her own shock, she spun around and automatically followed it, colliding heavily with a large, warm body that made a sharp, pained sound.

The syringe was being clenched by a pale, masculine hand, blood caked nails digging into the glass, and as he stumbled away, shoving her off of him and giving her a clear view of him, she found herself gasping in horror.

Chris looked worse than she had ever seen him, dark bruises contrasting starkly with the white skin of his face and semi-dry blood trails running down from his mouth. The rest of his body was covered by clothes, but by the condition the material was in, she could only guess what he looked like underneath.

What had Wesker  _done_  to him after they'd left?

But, more importantly, what was Chris doing now?

"Chris!" she shouted, advancing on him. He backed up.

"Chris, give me that! I have to inject Wesker, it'll make him—"

"I know what it'll do," he bit out. "But I can't let you."

Her heart sank, a million denials springing onto the tip of her tongue.

_No, no, no, Chris, you still can't be on Wesker's side, you helped me, Chris, no, what are you doing, snap out of it—_

In the corner of her eye, Wesker began to move, the third degree burns on his face already half healed.

"Give it to me," she demanded, desperation creeping into her voice. "Just give it to me, and we'll get you help. You're very sick, Chris."

"Go home, Claire," he said, looking somehow pleading. "Please, just go home. It's not too late."

"It  _is_  too late, Chris. It's very . . .  _very_  much too late."

They stared at each other, their eyes locking.

And then Chris threw the syringe on the floor and raised his foot. Claire lunged for him, slamming her hands into chest as hard as she could. He stumbled, grabbing her arm as he fell and pulling her down to the floor with him, where the struggle continued. They clawed and kicked, both trying to repel the other for long enough to reach the syringe, which the tip of Claire's boot had accidently hit on the way down, causing it to slide several feet away from them.

"Everyone on earth, Chris!" Claire screamed, delivering a kick to his side. "He's going to kill everyone in the world!"

"Not me!"

"It looks like he's already halfway done with you!"

Snarling, he pushed her to the side, making it up onto his hands and knees and struggling in the direction of the syringe.

But then a gunshot rang out and he collapsed instantly, curling in on himself as he reached down to cradle his knee, the back of which was now bleeding profusely through his pants leg.

"He'll live," Sheva shouted, darting down and picking up the syringe. Claire forced herself to her feet, turning and running back in Wesker's direction.

He still wasn't entirely recovered, though he was on his feet and looking about ready to run.

She jumped on his back before he got the chance, locking her elbows tight around his neck. "Inject him! Do it, now!"

Sheva wasted no time before running up and slamming the needle into his chest, emptying the full amount of the serum into him in less than three seconds.

.

Albert Wesker could remember the last time he'd been ill.

December 1991, during a particularly harsh Raccoon City winter; he'd picked it up from William, who had been incredibly susceptible to any and all sicknesses but had still insisted on working and exposing all of his coworkers to it.

It had made him continuously dizzy and nauseous for over two weeks; his limbs had been heavy and sluggish and incredibly achy, sometimes even borderline painful, and he'd had a pounding headache right above his eyes.

And, he'd been so  _tired_ , with barely even the energy to get out of bed.

Wesker couldn't get ill anymore, but in a matter of seconds, he had developed all of the symptoms he'd had back then. As Redfield let him go, he could hardly get his limbs to cooperate enough to keep himself standing, pain running up and down his bones and through his chest. His vision was blurred to such a degree that Redfield and Alomar, who were now staring at him with morbid curiosity on their faces, seemed to jump around the room and multiply, one transparent Redfield sliding into a solid one as she stood to Chris's left, and then suddenly to Alomar's right.

Suddenly the only thing Wesker felt like he could do was collapse, and with that feeling came a type of slow, creeping horror.

Because suddenly he was not only outnumbered, but  _outmatched_. As little as he thought of Redfield, the woman was a highly trained BSAA Agent, one who had survived Raccoon City when she'd been just a teenage girl, something the majority of the grown police officers in the city had been unable to do.

Redfield was good at her job and suddenly, he was very, very vulnerable.

So he picked the only intelligent option there was.

He ran.

.

Wesker had turned and fled before Claire had been able to react, pausing only to haul Chris up by the collar of his shirt and drag him along into the open back of a fighter jet parked on the other side of the hangar.

Claire rushed after him, using as much speed as she could muster on her aching legs. Straining out her arms as far as they could go, she hooked her fingers over the edge of the plane's loading ramp and pulled herself up, just as the motor roared to life and it began to move forward.

"Sheva!" she shouted, extending her arms again, this time out of the back and at her partner, who was running to catch up.

"Claire! I can't—"

"You can, just a little faster, it's almost over, please—"

Sheva set her jaw and closed her eyes, her run turning into a full-fledged sprint. Their fingers brushed and Sheva leapt, grabbing onto Claire's arms and heaving herself up and over the side.

She gasped deeply for air, even as Claire pulled her gun and spun to face Wesker, who was braced awkwardly against the wall with Chris beside him.

"I suppose I may have underestimated the strength of your obsession with your brother," he choked out, his voice strained.

"It's over, Wesker," she hissed. "All of it, everything, even your little doomsday plan. There's nothing you can do anymore. You're just the last of Umbrella's sad leftovers that needs to be put down."

Wesker laughed harshly through his tightly gritted teeth, steadying himself enough to stand on his own. "Nothing's 'over', Redfield . . . it's  _never_  over . . . Uroboros is still going to be detonated on schedule, and this rotting, filthy world will finally be cleansed, judged . . ."

"That's nice, Wesker. I mean, it certainly does take a special kind of mind to not only create its own reality, but live in it as well. Have fun while you're rotting in hell."

Claire traded glances with Sheva, and both of them glanced over at a lever a ways to their left.

"Override control?"

"On it."

"No!" Wesker snarled, pushing off the wall and charging at them. Claire dodged and countered again and again, displeased to find that despite the shot, Wesker was still unnaturally strong and faster than her, if not to the degree had had originally been.

They all landed hits, ducking and swerving and feinting as they did, Wesker almost bouncing off the walls as he tried with all his might to keep them from reaching the lever. She just narrowly avoided having her neck broken several times in the span of what could've only been a minute and finally,  _finally_ got within a foot of the control, only to have him grab her arm and twist.

She moved with it and avoided breaking the bone, swinging her gun up and pressing the barrel between his eyes.

She fired, point blank range, and he stumbled backwards, hitting the ground and sliding back to the wall as the plane jerked abruptly.

"Chris," he hissed, spiting blood out of his mouth. "Chris,  _stop her_ —"

Claire lunged for the lever.

.

Chris. Stop her.

Stop her.

Stop. Her. Christopher.

Stop her from pulling that lever, Chris, and stop her from destroying our plans, our world, our utopia, our dream.

Chris . . . stop her.

Chris Redfield loved Albert Wesker.

He always had, in one way or another, ever since he'd first met him that day in 1996, when he'd walked into the police station to interview for S.T.A.R.S. and had seen him standing there, leaning against the statue in the lobby and smirking at everyone who walked past.

Chris had been tainted on that day, changed and corrupted, and while he'd tried to pretend after the Mansion Incident that the only thing he felt for Wesker was a deep and utter loathing, that was a lie.

Chris had been tainted, dirtied by something that was unable to be washed off, and while he'd tried to live normally for seven long years, every day had been hellish; he'd been alone, isolated, suffocated, going through the motions of an empty life. He'd never even tried to pursue another relationship or make new friends; he'd never been able to just  _let it go_ , never been able to move on or start over.

He'd lived off of those rare missions where he might see him, where they would fight or fuck or just talk, anything, any type of interaction—it let him  _breathe_  again.

That had been his life, for seven lonely years.

But not anymore, and Chris wouldn't,  _couldn't_ , go back to that. He couldn't kill Wesker and go home and celebrate and be happy and continue a grey, lifeless existence.

He couldn't kill Wesker, because that would be like killing himself.

Chris, stop her.

.

In the days—weeks—months—years—decades to come, Wesker would always look back on this moment as one of the best in his life.

For the majority of that time, Chris would suffer with the memory, hate it and even deny it, until he finally forgot about it, just like he had many, many things.

And Claire . . . well, Claire . . .

.

Claire's fingers curled around the lever, and then a bullet ripped into the back of her skull, destroying bone and brain and killing her instantly.


	20. Snip Away and Sever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Swayin' to the rhythm of the new world order and counting bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums . . ."  
> \- A Perfect Circle, "Pet"

Uroboros, the snake that eternally swallowed its own tail, constantly trapped in an interminable circle of beginning and ending and then beginning again, rising up from the destruction of its own body like a phoenix from the ashes. Eternity, infinity, a loop, a cycle, never end never stop never die never live.

Chris had been born and lived for thirty two years in the first part of that continuous loop, rising from the tail and curving around until he'd finally formed the full circle with a struggle and a broken window and a fall and a shot, blue green liquid sliding into his veins and giving him new emotions and a new purpose and a new life.

Chris had lived two lives, one for thirty two years and one for three, and now the cycle had been completed again, his tail caught in his mouth once more as he crawled from the fiery wreckage of a jet that was now Claire's funeral pyre.

Around him, the world was on fire, lava flowing through cracks in the ground and bubbling up dangerously to the surface, flames licking at his clothes and face as he crawled along the scalding ground, his bruised body largely unresponsive save for his right hand, which held Wesker's old gun in a death grip.

It was surreal, the fire and the heat and the gun and the wreck, all of it blurring together into a haze that made it seem almost impossible that four minutes earlier, he'd been on the plane aiming the gun at Claire's head. It seemed so far away from where he was now, a nightmare or a hallucination, all of it maybe just an elaborate dying dream playing out in his head as he lay bleeding and broken on the grounds of Ozwell Spencer's estate.

Had any of it really happened?

The look of absolute, purely  _real_  horror on Sheva Alomar's face as she limped backwards away from him, her trembling hand over her mouth and her breathing unsteady, almost choking, provided him with an answer.

Four minutes ago, Wesker had told him to stop Claire. He'd told him to  _pick_ , to  _choose_ , between a lover and a rebirth or a sister and a life he'd once led.

And in that instant, he'd made his decision. He'd killed Claire and damned everyone on earth to what was, even now, spreading out from the detonation point like a cancer, silently infecting everyone it came in contact with as they went about their lives in total ignorance of what was about to happen.

He'd sacrificed six billion lives to be with Wesker, crashing past the point of no return with a shot from the gun in his hand, which he abruptly released, throwing off the edge and into the swirling red-orange lava.

The Samurai Edge melted gradually, the silver metal liquefying until all that was left was the grip, the S.T.A.R.S. symbol staring up at him mockingly until it, too, burnt away, one more link to his first life forever gone.

Perhaps Claire had been the last thing truly tying him down to those first thirty two years, a strong, choking chain around his neck to tether him even as he was destroyed and reborn. She had embodied everything he'd cared about, everything he'd fought for, the reason he hadn't just laid down and let himself die after the Mansion Incident.

But in the end, the chain hadn't been strong enough; Wesker had pried too many of the links loose over the years, and four minutes ago, it had finally snapped, shattered by an ultimatum and a decision and a gunshot.

_how far would you go for me how far would you go_

_anything anything anything_

Somewhere in the distance, a helicopter roared. Chris looked up and saw that it belonged to the BSAA, saw Alomar climbing a rope ladder up into it.

But even as he watched, he could feel stirrings inside his blood. He was infected, they all were, and he doubted anyone was going to be getting very far.

Wesker staggered over to him, falling heavily to the ground beside him and pulling him into a tight embrace, their chests heaving together. He murmured soothingly in his ear, his voice unusually gentle as the stirrings intensified and the mutation began.

Chris had sometimes wondered what they had all experienced, Lisa Trevor and Alexia Ashford and even the zombies, as their cells were overwhelmed by something they had no control over. What was it like, to lose yourself entirely?

It was warm. Very, very warm, a slow, numbing burn searing out from his chest and through his limbs, paralyzing and energizing all at once. Inside, he could feel things shift and liquefy and  _change,_ every cell in his body compliantly yielding to the new coding in his DNA and reforming him as it saw fit.

It was warm, hot, burning, searing, scalding phoenix fire turning him to ash, the eternal cycle completed, the snake's tail caught in its fangs once again after three years of long, difficult transition from one life to the next.

He was no longer a brother, or a friend, or a hero, or even a villain—

Now he was just . . . a monster.

_Anything for you, Wesker._


End file.
